>> theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone. Happy afternoon. Welcome back to theCUBE. This is Lisa Martin with Dave Vallante. We are on day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World live from Las Vegas with about 7,000- 8,000 people here. It's been a great two and a half days. Lots of people are still here. We're going to be talking more about Dell Services. I got a couple of guys from Dell Technologies joining us next. Please welcome Patrick Mooney, Senior Vice President of Services Product Management at Dell and Satish Iyer, Vice President of Emerging Services at Dell. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. Good evening. Great to be here to you. >> Happy to be here. >> So isn't it great to be back in person? >> So great. >> Those hallway conversations you just can't replicate it for video conferencing, right? >> Yeah. >> Priceless. >> It is priceless, I agree. Patrick, let's start with you. Talk to us about from a customer's perspective. What are some of the key services they've been looking for the last couple of years particularly, and how has Dell changed its strategic direction to deliver? >> Great question. Customers want outcomes and services are at the heart of outcomes. So when we look at customers transforming we're continually transforming and modernizing what we do and everything we're doing is centered around making it easy to buy, easy to consume and just centered around the customer. >> What are people looking for these days, Satish? I mean, what's the top three or four priorities. And we know cyber's up there. The cloud. One is when customers are consuming cloud, now there is more and more what we call as customers are looking for full stack solutions. So they start with giving me the best infrastructure on the platforms. Now they're saying, "I'm going to use those infrastructure to drive X, Y, and Z. "Now Mr. Dell, can you come and gimme those tags? "So I don't need to worry about anything "and I can actually consume it in the cloud like way." That's been massive for us. >> So, how do you guys respond to that? I mean, things in our little business things change so fast. And we can, but we're little. We can move fast. Customers are saying, okay, pandemic forced match to digital and now we got to figure it out. And now we got to modernize our HQ. How are you able to keep up? How are you changing your strategy as your customers pull you in different directions? What's going on inside the organization to enable that? >> Yeah. I think the key is that we meet customers where they are and help them plot out where they want to be. And then bring them along that journey. And we've really spent a lot of time developing four practices to help get there. One's around data and applications another around multi-cloud, another around workforce and another around security and resiliency. And no matter where they want to be, whether they want to do it themselves. They want us to help them do it or they want us to do it for them, we're there for them and we'll help them get where they want to be. >> Do you have like formal customer councils or how do you actually, especially the last couple years staying engaged with those customers? >> Absolutely. We're always talking to customers. It is critical to the model and we got a lot of ideas and customers have a lot of ideas and we want to vet those and talk through them. So no matter what point we're at in our product development cycle, we're always talking with customers, "Hey, do we hear you right? "Is this the value you're looking for?" And as we're developing it, can you help us test it? And so on. And we do that through regular conversations, field testing, customer insight councils, and it just feels so great to be having face to face conversations again as well. >> What is- >> Oh, go ahead. >> I was going to say, what are some of the things that you've heard face to face this week in terms of the direction, what Dell Services is delivering? >> Well, one big one for sure is that remote workforce is here to stay. And in our workforce pillar we spent a lot of time around how do we make it easy for customers to manage a remote workforce? It's a big challenge. So we've recently we announced here at Dell World, Lifecycle Hub Services where we it's a managed service where we're helping customers manage their entire device lifecycle around their PC. So imagine this you have a new hire joint or somebody leaves, how do you get 'em that PC? Have it ready? Let Dell take care of all the logistics, we'll we'll store it. We'll configure it. We'll send it to 'em we'll take the old machines back, we'll kit it for 'em anything that's needed and fully integrated it from the customer system into our system. So it's all automated. >> Okay. And all the patching, et cetera, >> Everything. Okay. So you got four pillars, data and apps multi-cloud, workforce and resiliency. What you just described, the automation, does IP and what's the IP portfolio look like? How does it map into those four pillars? >> Sure, you want to take that? >> Sure, so obviously when you look at growth areas and services, it's absolutely important for us to develop sustainable IP. If you look at one of the areas where we have invested and we are growing is cloud managed services platform. So Dell is unique in terms of managing our customer services. We actually do full lifecycle management of the customers. So we invested quite a bit of, I would say time and energy and engineering efforts to basically solve problems in engineered way. So the customer cloud managed services platform allows us to actually bring both, you talked about apex before to our other colleagues. So it allows us to both bring apex services to our customers and also allows us to bring non apex services in terms of fully managed to our customers. >> So multi-cloud must be a rich opportunity's probably almost infinite. There's a lot of gaps there for IP development. What are you seeing and hearing from customer with regard to those gaps? >> So one of the key areas when you talk about multi-cloud is we talk to customers about is the solution things we talked about. So we launched, we announced three solutions one we already launched. And the two of them will be announced is customers want that end-to-end outcome, right? 'Cause they are saying, well we are currently where we started today. We announced cyber security as a service. As you guys know, within the current geopolitical climate, cyber attacks are common, ransomware is common. So, and this is something which we are doing today to customers. What customers want is the simplicity of offering. They're like, you can help us with cyber security when something happens I have an insurance policy, so I can actually go I know where my data sets are. I can record from it, but can you streamline it for me? I don't want all the headaches. Can you make sure that it's easily consumable and Dell can take care of everything for me. And we are also investing on other LED solutions like machine learning, high performance compute. And we are also looking at vertical areas. So our customers, especially in telco, Edge and enterprise applications. So we are looking at those as a full stack offerings so that we can actually educate and take our customers on the journey on our MacCloud platforms. >> I going to talk about Dell Services as a facilitator of multi-cloud Chuck Whitton was on stage, He was here yesterday talking about multi-cloud is here by default. Well, Dell wants to change that to multi-cloud by design. How can Dell Services be a facilitator of that transformation that customers in telco or whatever industry have going from, We've got it by default to now it's actually by design, facilitating that? >> Yeah. I'll jump in and let you take it, we have a a robust consulting practice which can help you come in and understand where you're at and where you want to be and design that future. So that it's not, as you said by default, it's absolutely multi-cloud by design. Anything you want to add? >> Yeah. I mean, look again Dell has been doing multi-cloud for a long time. We just didn't call it multi-cloud. I would probably say 2014, 2015, Dell's been there. We know our customers have a choice. We want to operationalize. We want to help our customers run workloads wherever they want to run. Now, we have a term for it. We have a dedicated way of talking about it. And again, more automation more IP development, more software. And again, taking a lot of the people part away from services and driving more innovation, more IPs where we are going to be able to differentiate. >> So you're a large and pretty sophisticated services organization. We've talked about some of your IP. You now bring that to your customers. What are some of the adoption barriers that they have? How are you addressing those, in terms of taking your IP and your ideas? And you probably say, "Hey, we got this, you can apply this". What are they not ready for? That you sort of advise them, okay you got to do, these are some maybe, some out scope things that you haven't talked about or thought about. >> Yeah. I mean, I'll take one. And I know Patrick will probably touch on, I would say two big ones. I can think about the one is data. One is on security, right? I'll give you the data use case. So data has gravity, right? When customers think about, multi-cloud think about solution, think about these services. It's not easy to take petabytes and terabytes of data and shift all over the place. It's very, very expensive. So a lot of their cloud strategy really hinges on where the data is, and how they're going to optimize those data for the outcomes they want to decide. And that's something a lot of our customers initially don't think about it as we actually go and talk to them about this specific use case and application that actually becomes forefront of the discussion. >> Yeah. On the security front, customers are just overwhelmed with the number of options in a very fragmented, extremely important space. So we've tried to make that very easy for them with our managed detection and response services, bringing the best of the industry and Dell Services together to give them a one stop shop managed service, let us watch for you so that you can run your business. And when we detect something, we'll advise you and help you respond. >> What's the tooling like there. I mean, you have, do you have your preferred tooling? Are the customers saying, well we got to use this vendor or that vendor, how do you manage all that complex? >> Of course we have our preferred tooling and we partner greatly with secure works to do it as well as some other company, but that said what's important to us with the service is that a customer meets specific, they're green in five different categories. And if they're green in those categories, then we're good to help them. And if they don't know how to do that, then we'll come in and do a security assessment to help them get there. And just taking what's very complicated and making it easy. >> On the security front. We've been talking about the cyber skills gap, massive skills gap that's been around for years. How is Dell Services facilitator of organizations being able to close that gap? >> Sure. In a few ways, one, we can just do it for you, right? Two, if you want to do it yourself, we can supplement you with security residents to help you manage through the complexity and cross train while as part of your staff. And then three, we have our Dell Education Services where we can come in and train you as well. So lots of different options on how you want to do it. >> Yeah. >> No matter what you choose, we're here for you. (panelists laughing) >> That people option's important. I mean, people being the biggest threat factor that there is, right. >> Absolutely. >> For sure. >> That's probably one of the hardest ones to augment. >> Yeah. I mean, that's the reason why when you look at cyber security customers, want somebody else to manage it because you don't want the same folks making the same mistake on an insurance policy. So they're like Dell, you manage it for me. So I don't have the same actor is doing same things. So I have somebody managing my data but somebody managing my record option. So in case something goes wrong I know it's a different handset different people who are much more relaxed when things go back >> That's always nice to have somebody that's relaxed in a crisis. >> Absolutely. And I think I'll take that in my personal life too. Guys thank you for joining Dave and me talking about what's new with Dell Services the modernization that you're undergoing and how your customers are really helping to evolve this strategy. We appreciate your insight. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you so much for your time. Great seeing you. >> Right. Likewise for Dave Vallante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. This is day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World, live from Las Vegas, stick around Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, It's theCUBE. Covering UiPath FORWARD IV. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD IV. Live from the Bellagio, in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We're here all day today and tomorrow. We're going to talk about process mining next. We've got two guests here. Mike Engel is here, intelligent automation and process intelligence leader at PWC. And Ryan McMahon, the SVP of growth at UiPath. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you. >> So Ryan, I'm going to start with you. Talk to us about process mining. How does UiPath do it differently and what are some of the things being unveiled at this event? >> So look, I would tell you it's actually more than process mining and hopefully, not only you but others saw this this morning with Param. It's really about the full capabilities of that discovery suite. In which, obviously, process mining is part of. But it starts with task capture. So, going out and actually working with subject matter experts on a process. Accounts payable, accounts receivable, order to cash, digitally capturing that process or how they believe it should work or execute across one's environment. Right Mike? And then from there, actually validating or verifying with things or capabilities like process mining. Giving you a full digital x-ray of actually how that process is being executed in the enterprise. Showing you process bottlenecks. For things like accounts payable, showing you days outstanding, maverick buying, so you can actually pin point and do a few things. Fix your process, right? Where process should be fixed. Fix your application because it's probably not doing what you think it is, and then third, and where the value comes, is in our platform of which process mining is a capability, our PA platform. Really moving directly to automations, right? And then, having the ability with even task mining to drill into a specific bottleneck. Capturing keystrokes, clicks, and then moving to, with both of those, process mining and task mining, into Automation Hub, as part of our discovery platform as well. Being able to crowdsource, prioritize, all of those potential, if you will, just capabilities of automations, and saying, "Okay, let's go and prioritize these. These deliver to the greatest value," and executing across them. So, as much as it is about process mining, it's actually the whole entire discovery suite of capabilities that differentiates UiPath from other RPA vendors, as the only RPA vendor that delivers process mining, task mining and this discovery suite as part of our enterprise automation platform. >> Such a critical point, Ryan. I mean, it's multi-dimensional. It's not just one component. It's not just process mining or task mining, it's the combination that's really impactful. Agree with you a hundred percent. >> So, one of the things that people who watch our shows know, I'm like a broken record on this, the early days of RPA, I called it paving the cow path. And that was good because somebody knew the process, they just repeat it. But the problem was, the process wasn't necessarily the best process. As you just described. So, when you guys made the acquisition of ProcessGold, I said, "Okay, now I'm starting to connect the dots," and now a couple years on, we're starting to see that come together. This is what I think is most misunderstood about UiPath, and I wonder, from a practitioner's perspective, if you can sort of fill in some of those gaps. It's that, it's different from a point tool, it's different from a productivity tool. Like Power Automate, I'll just say it, that's running in Azure Cloud, that's cool or a vertically integrated part of some ERP Stack. This is a horizontal play that is end to end. Which is a bigger automation agenda, it's bold but it's potentially huge. $60 billion dollar TAM, I think that's understated. Maybe you could, from a practitioner's perspective, share with us the old way, >> Yeah. >> And kind of, the new way. >> Well obviously, we all made a lot of investments in this space, early on, to determine what should we be automating in the first place? We even went so far as, we have platforms that will transcribe these kind of surveys and discussions that we're having with our clients, right. But at the end of the day all we're learning is what they know about the process. What they as individuals know about the process. And that's problematic. Once we get into the next phase of actually developing something, we miss something, right? Because we're trying to do this rapidly. So, I think what we have now is really this opportunity to have data driven insights and our clients are really grabbing onto that idea, that it's good to have a sense of what they think they do but it's more important to have a sense of what they actually do. >> Are you seeing, in the last year in a half we've seen the acceleration of a lot of things, there's some silver linings but we've also seen the acceleration in automation as a mandate. Where is it? In terms of a priority, that you're seeing with customers, and are there any industries that you're seeing that are really leading the edge here? >> Well I do see it as a priority and of course, in the role that I have, obviously everybody I talk to, it's a priority for them. But I think it's kind of changing. People are understanding that it's not just a sense of, as Ryan was pointing out, it's not just a sense of getting an understanding of what we do today, it's really driving it to that next step of actually getting something impactful out the other end. Clients are starting to understand that. I like to categorize them, there's three types of clients, there's starters, there's stall-ers and those that want to scale. >> Right? So we're seeing a lot more on the other ends of this now, where clients are really getting started and they're getting a good sense that this is important for them because they know that identifying the opportunities in the first place is the most difficult part of automation. That's what's stalling the programs. Then on the other end of the spectrum, we've got these clients that are saying, "Hey, I want to do this really at scale, can you help us do that?" >> (Ryan) Right. >> And it's quite a challenge. >> How do I build a pipeline of automations? So I've had success in finance and accounting, fantastic. How do I take this to operations? How do I take this this to supply chain? How do I take this to HR? And when I do that, it all starts with, as Wendy Batchelder, Chief Data Officer at VMware, would say and as a customer, "It starts with data but more importantly, process." So focusing on process and where we can actually deliver automation. So it's not just about those insights, it's about moving from insights to actionable next steps. >> Right. >> And that is where we're seeing this convergence, if you will, take place. As we've seen it many times before. I mentioned I worked at Cisco in the past, we saw this with Voice Over IP converging on the network. We saw this at VMware, who I know you guys have spoken to multiple times. When a move from a hypervisor to including NSX with the network, to including cloud management and also VSAN for storage, and converging in software. We're seeing it too with process, really. Instead of kids and clipboards, as they used to call it, and many Six Sigma and Lean workshops, with whiteboards and sticky papers, to actually showing people within, really, days how a process is being executed within their organization. And then, suggesting here's where there's automation capabilities, go execute against them. >> So Ryan, this is why sometimes I scoff at the TAM analysis. I get you've got to do the TAM analysis, you've got to communicate to Wall Street. But basically what you do is you pull out IDC or Gartner data, which is very stovepipe, and you kind of say, "Okay we're in this market." It's the convergence of these markets. It's cloud, it's containers, it's IS, it's PaaS, it's Saas, it's blockchain, it's automation. They're all coming together to form this, it sound like a buzzword but this digital matrix, if you will. And it's how well you leverage that digital matrix, which defines your digital business. So, talk about the role that automation, generally, RPA specifically, process mining specifically, play in a digital business. >> Do you want to take that Mike or do you want me to take it? >> We can both do it? How about that? >> Yeah, perfect. >> So I'll start with it. I mean all this is about convergence at this point, right? There are a number of platform providers out there, including UiPath, that are kind of teaching us that. Often times led by the software vendors in terms of how we think of it but what we know is that there's no one solution. We went down the RPA path, lots of clients and got a lot of excitement and a lot of impact but if you really want to drive it broader, what clients are looking at now, is what is the ecosystem of tools that we need to have in place to make that happen? And from our perspective, it's got to start with really, process intelligence. >> What I would say too, if you look at digital transformation, it was usually driven from an application. Right? Really. And what I think customers found was that, "Hey," I'm going to name some folks here, "Put everything in SAP and we'll solve all your problems." Larry Ellison will tell you, "Put everything into Oracle and we'll solve all your problems." Salesforce, now, I'm a salesperson, I've never used an out of the box Salesforce dashboard in my life, to run my business because I want to run it the way I want to run it. Having said that though, they would say the same thing, "Put everything into our platform and we'll make sure that we can access it and you can use it everywhere and we'll solve all of your problems." I think what customers found is that that's not the case. So they said, "Okay, where are there other ways. Yes, I've got my application doing what it's doing, I've improved my process but hang on. There's things that are repeatable here that I can remove to actually focus on higher level orders." And that's where UiPath comes in. We've kind of had a bottom up swell but I would tell you that as we deliver ROI within days or weeks, versus potentially years and with a heavy, heavy investment up front. We're able to do it. We're able to then work with our partners like PWC, to then demonstrate with business process modeling, the ability to do it across all those, as I call, Silo's of excellence in an organization, to deliver true value, in a timeline, with integrated services from our partner, to execute and deliver on ROI. >> You mentioned some of the great software companies that have been created over the years. One you didn't mention but I want you to comment on it is Service Now. Because essentially McDermott's trying to create the platform of platforms. All about workflow and service management. They bought an RPA company, "Hey we got this too." But it's still a walled garden. It's still the same concept is put everything in here. My question is, how are you different? Yeah look, we're going to integrate with customers who want to integrate because we're an open platform and that's the right approach. We believe there will be some overlap and there'll be some choices to be made. Instead of that top down different approach, which may be a little bit heavy and a large investment up front, with varied results, as far as what that looks like, ours is really a bottoms up. I would tell you too, if you look at our community, which is a million and a half, I believe, strong now and growing, it's really about that practitioner and those people that have embraced it from the bottom up that really change how it gets implemented. And you don't have what I used to call the white blood cells, pushing back when you're trying to say, "Hey, let's take it from this finance and accounting to HR, to the supply chain, to the other sides of the organization," saying, "Hey look, be part of this," instead of, "No, you will do." >> Yeah, there's no, at least that I know of, there's no SAP or Salesforce freemium. You can't try it before you buy. And the entry price is way higher. I mean generally. I guess Salesforce not necessarily but I could taste automation for well under $100,000. I could get in for, I bet you most of your customers started at 25 of $50,000 departmental deployments. >> It's a bottoms up ground swell, that's exactly right. And it's really that approach. Which is much more like an Atlassian, I will tell you and it's really getting to the point where we obviously, and I'm saying this, I work at UiPath, we make really good software. And so, out of the box, it's getting easier and easier to use. It all integrates. Which makes it seamless. The reason people move to RPA first was because they got tired of bouncing between applications to do a task. Now we deliver this enterprise automation platform where you can go from process discovery to crowd sourcing and prioritizing your automations with your pipeline of automations, into Studio, into creating those automations, into testing them and back again, right? We give you the opportunity not to leave the platform and extract the most value out of our, what we call enterprise automation platform. Inclusive of process mining. Inclusive of testing and all those capabilities, document understanding, which is also mine, and it's fantastic. It's very differentiated from others that are out there. >> Well it's about having the right framework in place. >> That's it. From an automation perspective. I think that's a little bit different from what you would expect from the SAP's of the world. Mike, where are you seeing, in the large organizations that you work with, we think of what you describe as the automation pipeline, where are some of the key priorities that you're finding in large organizations? What's in that pipeline and in what order? >> It's interesting because every time we have a conversation whether it's internal or with our clients, we come up with another use case for this type of technology. Obviously, when we're having the initial conversations, what we're talking about is really automation. How do we stuff that pipe with automation. But you know, we have clients that are saying, "Hey listen, I'm trying to carve out of a parent company and what I need to do is document all of my processes in a meaningful way, that I can, at some point, take action on, so there's meaningful outcomes." Whether it be a shared services organization that's looking to outsource, all different types of use cases. So, prioritizing is, I think, it's about impact and the quickest way to impact seems to be automation. >> Is it fair to say, can I look at you UiPath as automation infrastructure? Is that okay or do you guys want to say, "Oh, we're an application." The reason I ask, so then you can answer, is if you look at the great infrastructure plays, they all had a role. The DBA, the CCIE from Cisco, the Cloud Architect, the VMware admin, you've been at all of them, Ryan. So, is there a role emerging here and if it's not plumbing or infrastructure, I know, okay that's cool but course correct me on the infrastructure comment and then, is there a role emerging? >> You know, I think the difference between UiPath and some of the infrastructure companies is, it used to take, Dave, years to give an ROI, really. You'd invest in infrastructure and it's like, if we build it they will come. In fact, we've seen this with Cloud, where we kind of started doing some of that on prem, right? We can do this but then you had Amazon, Azure and others kind of take it and say, "Look, we can do it better, faster and cheaper." It's that simple. So, I would say that we are an application and that we reference it as an enterprise automation platform. It's more than infrastructure. Now, are we going to, as I mentioned, integrate to an open platform, to other capabilities? Absolutely. I think, as you see with our investments and as we continue to build this out, starting in core RPA, buying ProcessGold and getting into our discovery suite of capabilities I covered, getting into, what I see next is, as you start launching many bots into your organization, you're touching multiple applications, so you got to test it. Any time you would launch an application you're going to test it before you go live, right? We see another convergence with testing and I know you had Garrett on and Matt, earlier, with testing, application testing, which has been a legacy, kind of dinosaur market, converging with RPA, where you can deliver automations to do it better, faster and cheaper. >> Thank you for that clarification but now Mike, is that role, I know roles are emerging in RPA and automation but is there, I mean, we're seeing centers of excellence pop up, is there an analogy there or sort of a similar- >> Yeah, I think the new role, if you will, it's not super new but it's really that sense of an automation solution architect. It's a whole different thing. We're talking about now more about recombinant innovation. >> Mike: Yeah. >> Than we are about build it from scratch. Because of the convergence of these low-code, no-code types of solutions. It's a different skill set. >> And we see it at PWC. You have somebody who is potentially a process expert but then also somebody who understands automations. It's the convergences of those two, as well, that's a different skill set. It really is. And it's actually bringing those together to get the most value. And we see this across multiple organizations. It starts with a COE. We've done great with our community, so we have that upswell going and then people are saying, "Hang on, I understand process but I also understand automations. let me put the two together," and that's where we get our true value. >> Bringing in the education and training. >> No question. >> That's a huge thing. >> The traditional components of it still need to exist but I think there are new roles that are emerging, for sure. >> It's a big cultural shift. >> Oh absolutely, yeah. >> How do you guys, how does PWC and UiPath, and maybe you each can answer this in the last minute or so, how do you help facilitate that cultural shift in a business that's growing at warp speed, in a market that is very tumultuous? How do you do that? >> Want to go first or I can go? >> I'll go ahead and go first. It's working with great partners like Mike because they see it and they're converging two different practices within their organization to actually bring this value to customers and also that executive relevance. But even on our side, when we're meeting with customers, just in general, we're actually talking about, how do we deal with, there's what? 13 and a half million job openings, I guess, right now and there's 8500 people that are unemployed, is the last number that I heard. We couldn't even fill all of those jobs if we wanted to. So it's like, okay, what is it that we could potentially automate so maybe we don't need all those jobs. And that's not a negative, it's just saying, we couldn't fill them anyway. So let's focus on where we can and where, there again, can extract the most value in working with our partners but create this new domain that's not networking or virtualization but it's actually, potentially, process and automation. It's testing and automation. It might even be security and automation. Which, I will tell you, is probably coming next, having come out of the security space. You know, I sit there and listen to all these threats and I see these people chasing, really, automated threats. It's like, guys a threat hunter that's really good goes through the same 15 steps that they would when they're chasing a false positive, as if a bot would do that for them. >> I mean, I've written about the productivity declines over the past several decades in western countries, it's not universal around the world and maybe we have a productivity boost because of Covid but it's like this perpetual workday now. That's not sustainable. So we're not going to be able to solve the worlds great problems. Whether it's climate change, diversity, massive deaths, on and on and on, unless we deal with that labor gap. >> That's right. >> And the only way to do that is automation. It's so clear to me that that's the answer. Part of the answer. >> It is part of the answer and I think, to your point Lisa, it's a cultural shift that's going to happen whether we want it to or not. When you think about people that are coming into the work force, it's an expectation now. So if you want to retain or you know, attract and retain the right people, you'd better be prepared for it as an organization. >> Yeah, remember the old, proficient in Word and Excel. Makes it almost trivial. It's trivial compared to that. I think if you don't have automation chops, going forward, it's going to be an issue. Hey, we have whatever, 5000 bots running at our company, how could you help? Huh? What's a bot? >> That's right. You're right. We see this too. I'll give you an example at Cisco. One of their financial analysts, junior starter, he says, "Part of our training program, is creating automations. Why? Because it's not just about finance anymore. It's about what can I automate in my role to actually focus on higher level orders and this for me, is just amazing." And you know, it's Rajiv Ramaswamy's son who's over there at Cisco now as a financial analyst. I was sitting on my couch on a Saturday, no kidding, right Dave? And I get a text from Rajiv, who's now CEO at Nutanix, and he says, "I can't believe I just created a bot." And I said, "I'm at the right place." Really. >> That's cool, I mean hey, you're right too. You want to work for Amazon, you got to know how to provision a EC2 instance or you don't get the job. >> Yeah. >> You got to train for that. And these are the types of skills that are expected- >> That's right. >> For the future. >> Awesome. Guys- >> I'm glad I'm older. >> Are you no longer proficient in Word is the question. >> Guys, thanks for joining us, talking about what you guys are doing together, how you're really facilitating this massive growth trajectory. It's great to be back in person and we look forward to hearing from some of your customers later today. >> Terrific. >> Great. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you guys. >> Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from the Bellagio in Las Vegas, at UiPath FORWARD IV. Stick around. We'll be back after a short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this special cloud virtual event, theCUBE on cloud. This is our continuing editorial series of the most important stories in cloud. We're going to explore the cutting edge most relevant technologies and companies that will impact business and society. We have special guests from Jeff Barr, Michael Liebow, Jerry Chen, Ben Haynes, Michael skulk, Mike Feinstein from AWS all today are presenting the top startups in the AWS ecosystem. This is the AWS showcase of startups. I'm showing with Dave Vellante. Dave great to see you. >> Hey John. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> So awesome day today. We're going to feature a 10 grade companies amplitude, auto grid, big ID, cordial Dremio Kong, multicloud, Reltio stardog wire wheel, companies that we've talked to. We've researched. And they're going to present today from 10 for the rest of the day. What's your thoughts? >> Well, John, a lot of these companies were just sort of last decade, they really, were keyer kicker mode, experimentation mode. Now they're well on their way to hitting escape velocity which is very exciting. And they're hitting tens of millions dollars of ARR, many are planning IPO's and it's just it's really great to see what the cloud has enabled and we're going to dig into that very deeply today. So I'm super excited. >> Before we jump into the keynote (mumbles) our non Huff from AWS up on stage Jeremy is the brains behind this program that we're doing. We're going to do this quarterly. Jeremy great to see you, you're in the global startups program at AWS. Your job is to keep the crops growing, keep the startups going and keep the flow of innovation. Thanks for joining us. >> Yeah. Made it to startup showcase day. I'm super excited. And as you mentioned my team the global startup program team, we kind of provide white glove service for VC backed startups and help them with go to market activities. Co-selling with AWS and we've been looking for ways to highlight all the great work they're doing and partnering with you guys has been tremendous. You guys really know how to bring their stories to life. So super excited about all the partner sessions today. >> Well, I really appreciate the vision and working with Amazon this is like truly a bar raiser from theCUBE virtual perspective, using the virtual we can get more content, more flow and great to have you on and bring that the top hot startups around data, data ops. Certainly the most important story in tech is cloud scale with data. You you can't look around and seeing more innovation happening. So I really appreciate the work. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, and don't forget, we're making this a quarterly series. So the next one we've already been working on it. The next one is Wednesday, June 16th. So mark your calendars, but super excited to continue doing these showcases with you guys in the future. >> Thanks for coming on Jeremy. I really appreciate it,. Dave so I want to just quick quickly before we get Jeff up here, Jeff Barr who's a luminary guests for us this week who has been in the industry has been there from the beginning of AWS the role of data, and what's happened in cloud. And we've been watching the evolution of Amazon web services from the beginning, from the startup market to dominate in the enterprise. If you look at the top 10 enterprise companies Amazon wasn't on that list in 2010 they weren't even bringing the top 10 Andy Jassy's keynote at reinvent this past year. Highlighted that fact, I think they were number five or four as vendor in just AWS. So interesting to see that you've been reporting and doing a lot of analysis on the role of data. What's your analysis for these startups and as businesses need to embrace the new technologies and be on the right side of history not part of that old guard, incumbent failed model. >> Well, I think again, if you look back on the early days of cloud, it was really about storage and networking and compute infrastructure. And then we collected all this data and now you're seeing the next generation of innovation and value. We're going to talk to Michael Liebow about this is really if you look at all the value points in the leavers, it's all around data and data is going through a massive change in the way that we think about it, that we talk about it. And you hear that a lot. Obviously you talk about the volumes, the giant volumes but there's something else going on as AWS brings the cloud to the edge. And of course it looks at the data centers, just another edge device, data is getting highly decentralized. And what we're seeing is data getting into the hands of business owners and data product builders. I think we're going to see a new parlance emerge and that's where you're seeing the competitive advantage. And if you look at all the real winners these days in the marketplace especially in the digital with COVID, it all comes back to the data. And we're going to talk about that a lot today. >> One of the things that's coming up in all of our cube interviews, certainly we've seen, I mean we've had a great observation space across all the ecosystems, but the clear thing that's coming out of COVID is speed, agility, scale, and data. If you don't have that data you are going to be a non-player. And I think I heard some industry people talking about the future of how the stock market's going to work and that if you're not truly in market with an AI or machine learning data value play you probably will be shorted on the stock market or delisted. I think people are looking at that as a table stakes competitive advantage item, where if you don't have some sort of data competitive strategy you're going to be either delisted or sold short. And that's, I don't think delisted but the point is this table-stakes Dave. >> Well, I think too, I think the whole language the lingua franca of data is changing. We talk about data as an asset all the time, but you think about it now, what do we do with assets? We protect it, we hide it. And we kind of we don't share it. But then on the other hand, everybody talks about sharing the data and that is a huge trend in the marketplace. And so I think that everybody is really starting to rethink the whole concept of data, what it is, its value and how we think about it, talk about it, share it make it accessible, and at the same time, protect it and make it governed. And I think you're seeing, computational governance and automation really hidden. Couldn't do this without the cloud. I mean, that's the bottom line. >> Well, I'm super excited to have Jeff Barr here from AWS as our special keynote guests. I've been following Jeff's career for a long, long time. He's a luminaries, he's a technical, he's in the industry. He's part of the community, he's been there from the beginning AWS just celebrate its 15th birthday as he was blogging hard. He's been a hardcore blogger. I think Jeff, you had one of the original ping service. If I remember correctly, you were part of the web services foundational kind of present at creation. No better guests to have you Jeff thanks for coming up on our stage. >> John and Dave really happy to be here. >> So I got to ask you, you've been blogging hard for the past decade or so, going hard and your job has evolved from blogging about what's new with Amazon. A couple of building blocks a few services to last reinvent them. You must have put out I don't know how many blog posts did you put out last year at every event? I mean, it must have been a zillion. >> Not quite a zillion. I think I personally wrote somewhere between 20 and 25 including quite a few that I did in the month or so run up to reinvent and it's always intense, but it's always really, really fun. >> So I've got to ask you in the past couple of years, I mean I quoted Andy Jassy's keynote where we highlight in 2010 Amazon wasn't even on the top 10 enterprise players. Now in the top five, you've seen the evolution. What is the big takeaway from your standpoint as you look at the enterprise going from Amazon really dominating the start of a year startups today, you're in the cloud, you're born in the cloud. There's advantage to that. Now enterprises are kind of being reborn in the cloud at the same time, they're building these new use cases rejuvenating themselves and having innovation strategy. What's your takeaway? >> So I love to work with our customers and one of the things that I hear over and over again and especially the last year or two is really the value that they're placing on building a workforce that has really strong cloud skills. They're investing in education. They're focusing on this neat phrase that I learned in Australia called upskilling and saying let's take our set of employees and improve their skill base. I hear companies really saying we're going to go cloud first. We're going to be cloud native. We're going to really embrace it, adopt the full set of cloud services and APIs. And I also see that they're really looking at cloud as part of often a bigger picture. They often use the phrase digital transformation, in Amazon terms we'd say they're thinking big. They're really looking beyond where they are and who they are to what they could be and what they could grow into. Really putting a lot of energy and creativity into thinking forward in that way. >> I wonder Jeff, if you could talk about sort of how people are thinking about the future of cloud if you look at where the spending action is obviously you see it in cloud computing. We've seen that as the move to digital, serverless Lambda is huge. If you look at the data it's off the charts, machine learning and AI also up there containers and of course, automation, AWS leads in all of those. And they portend a different sort of programming model a different way of thinking about how to deploy workloads and applications maybe different than the early days of cloud. What's driving that generally and I'm interested in serverless specifically. And how do you see the next several years folding out? >> Well, they always say that the future is the hardest thing to predict but when I talked to our enterprise customers the two really big things that I see is there's this focus that says we need to really, we're not simply like hosting the website or running the MRP. I'm working with one customer in particular where they say, well, we're going to start on the factory floor all the way up to the boardroom effectively from IOT and sensors on the factory floor to feed all the data into machine learning. So they understand that the factory is running really well to actually doing planning and inventory maintenance to putting it on the website to drive the analytics, to then saying, okay, well how do we know that we're building the right product mix? How do we know that we're getting it out through the right channels? How are our customers doing? So they're really saying there's so many different services available to us in the cloud and they're relatively easy and straightforward to deploy. They really don't think in the old days as we talked about earlier that the old days where these multi-year planning and deployment cycles, now it's much more straightforward. It's like let's see what we can do today. And this week and this month, and from idea to some initial results is a much, much shorter turnaround. So they can iterate a lot more quickly which is just always known to produce better results. >> Well, Jeff and the spirit of the 15th birthday of AWS a lot of services have been built from the original three. I believe it was the core building blocks and there's been a lot of history and it's kind of like there was a key decoupling of compute from storage, those innovations what's the most important architectural change if any has happened or built upon those building blocks with AWS that you could share with companies out there as many people are coming into the cloud not just lifting and shifting and having that innovation but really building cloud native and now hybrid full cloud operations, day two operations. However you want to look at it. That's a big thing. What architecturally has changed that's been innovative from those original building blocks? >> Well, I think that the basic architecture has proven to be very, very resilient. When I wrote about the 15 year birthday of Amazon S3 a couple of weeks ago one thing that I thought was really incredible was the fact that the same APIs that you could have used 15 years ago they all still work. The put, the get, the list, the delete, the permissions management, every last one of those were chosen with extreme care. And so they all still work. So one of the things you think about when you put APIs out there is in Amazon terms we always talk about going through a one-way door and a one way door says, once you do it you're committed for the indefinite future. And so you we're very happy to do that but we take those steps with extreme care. And so those basic building blocks so the original S3 APIs, the original EC2 APIs and the model, all those things really worked. But now they're running at this just insane scale. One thing that blows me away I routinely hear my colleagues talking about petabytes and exabytes, and we throw around trillions and quadrillions like they're pennies. It's kind of amazing. Sometimes when you hear the scale of requests per day or request per month, and the orders of magnitude are you can't map them back to reality anymore. They're simply like literally astronomical. >> If I can just jump in real quick Dave before you ask Jeff, I was watching the Jeff Bezos interview in 1999 that's been going around on LinkedIn in a 60 minutes interview. The interviewer says you are reporting that you can store a gigabyte of customer data from all their purchases. What are you going to do with that? He basically nailed the answer. This is in 99. We're going to use that data to create, that was only a gig. >> Well one of the things that is interesting to me guys, is if you look at again, the early days of cloud, of course I always talked about that in small companies like ours John could have now access to information technology that only big companies could get access to. And now you've seen we just going to talk about it today. All these startups rise up and reach viability. But at the same time, Jeff you've seen big companies get the aha moment on cloud and competition drives urgency and that drives innovation. And so now you see everybody is doing cloud, it's a mandate. And so the expectation is a lot more innovation, experimentation and speed from all ends. It's really exciting to see. >> I know this sounds hackneyed and overused but it really, really still feels just like day one. We're 15 plus years into this. I still wake up every morning, like, wow what is the coolest thing that I'm going to get to learn about and write about today? We have the most amazing customers, one of the things that is great when you're so well connected to your customers, they keep telling you about their dreams, their aspirations, their use cases. And we can just take that and say we can actually build awesome things to help you address those use cases from the ground on up, from building custom hardware things like the nitro system, the graviton to the machine learning inferencing and training chips where we have such insight into customer use cases because we have these awesome customers that we can make these incredible pieces of hardware and software to really address those use cases. >> I'm glad you brought that up. This is another big change, right? You're getting the early days of cloud like, oh, Amazon they're just using off the shelf components. They're not buying these big refrigerator sized disc drives. And now you're developing all this custom Silicon and vertical integration in certain aspects of your business. And that's because workload is demanding. You've got to get more specialized in a lot of cases. >> Indeed they do. And if you watch Peter DeSantis' keynote at re-invent he talked about the fact that we're researching ways to make better cement that actually produces less carbon dioxide. So we're now literally at the from the ground on up level of construction. >> Jeff, I want to get a question from the crowd here. We got, (mumbles) who's a good friend of theCUBE cloud Arate from the beginning. He asked you, he wants to know if you'd like to share Amazon's edge aspirations. He says, he goes, I mean, roadmaps. I go, first of all, he's not going to talk about the roadmaps, but what can you share? I mean, obviously the edge is key. Outpost has been all in the news. You obviously at CloudOps is not a boundary. It's a distributed network. What's your response to-- >> Well, the funny thing is we don't generally have technology roadmaps inside the company. The roadmap is always listen really well to customers not just where they are, but the customers are just so great at saying, this is where we'd like to go. And when we hear edge, the customers don't generally come to us and say edge, they say we need as low latency as possible between where the action happens within our factory floors and our own offices and where we might be able to compute, analyze, store make decisions. And so that's resulted in things like outposts where we can put outposts in their own data center or their own field office, wavelength, where we're working with 5G telecom providers to put computing storage in the carrier hubs of the various 5G providers. Again, with reducing latency, we've been doing things like local zones, where we put zones in an increasing number of cities across the country with the goal of just reducing the average latency between the vast majority of customers and AWS resources. So instead of thinking edge, we really think in terms of how do we make sure that our customers can realize their dreams. >> Staying on the flywheel that AWS has built on ship stuff faster, make things faster, smaller, cheaper, great mission. I want to ask you about the working backwards document. I know it's been getting a lot of public awareness. I've been, that's all I've learned in interviewing Amazon folks. They always work backwards. I always mentioned the customer and all the interviews. So you've got a couple of customer references in there check the box there for you. But working backwards has become kind of a guiding principles, almost like a Harvard Business School case study approach to management. As you guys look at this working backwards and ex Amazonians have written books about it now so people can go look at, it's a really good methodology. Take us back to how you guys work back from the customers because here we're featuring 10 startups. So companies that are out there and Andy has been preaching this to customers. You should think about working backwards because it's so fast. These companies are going into this enterprise market your ecosystem of startups to provide value. What things are you seeing that customers need to think about to work backwards from their customer? How do you see that? 'Cause you've been on the community side, you see the tech side customers have to move fast and work backwards. What are the things that they need to focus on? What's your observation? >> So there's actually a brand new book called "Working Backwards," which I actually learned a lot about our own company from simply reading the book. And I think to me, a principal part of learning backward it's really about humility and being able to be a great listener. So you don't walk into a customer meeting ready to just broadcast the latest and greatest that we've been working on. You walk in and say, I'm here from AWS and I simply want to learn more about who you are, what you're doing. And most importantly, what do you want to do that we're not able to help you with right now? And then once we hear those kinds of things we don't simply write down kind of a bullet item of AWS needs to improve. It's this very active listening process. Tell me a little bit more about this challenge and if we solve it in this way or this way which one's a better fit for your needs. And then a typical AWS launch, we might talk to between 50 and 100 customers in depth to make sure that we have that detailed understanding of what they would like to do. We can't always meet all the needs of these customers but the idea is let's see what is the common base that we can address first. And then once we get that first iteration out there, let's keep listening, let's keep making it better and better and better as quickly. >> A lot of people might poopoo that John but I got to tell you, John, you will remember this the first time we ever met Andy Jassy face-to-face. I was in the room, you were on the speaker phone. We were building an app on AWS at the time. And he was asking you John, for feedback. And he was probing and he pulled out his notebook. He was writing down and he wasn't just superficial questions. He was like, well, why'd you do it that way? And he really wanted to dig. So this is cultural. >> Yeah. I mean, that's the classic Amazon. And that's the best thing about it is that you can go from zero startups zero stage startup to traction. And that was the premise of the cloud. Jeff, I want to get your thoughts and commentary on this love to get your opinion. You've seen this grow from the beginning. And I remember 'cause I've been playing with AWS since the beginning as well. And it says as an entrepreneur I remember my first EC2 instance that didn't even have custom domain support. It was the long URL. You seen the startups and now that we've been 15 years in, you see Dropbox was it just a startup back in the day. I remember these startups that when they were coming they were all born on Amazon, right? These big now unicorns, you were there when these guys were just developers and these gals. So what's it like, I mean, you see just the growth like here's a couple of people with them ideas rubbing nickels together, making magic happen who knows what's going to turn into, you've been there. What's it been like? >> It's been a really unique journey. And to me like the privilege of a lifetime, honestly I've like, you always want to be part of something amazing and you aspire to it and you study hard and you work hard and you always think, okay, somewhere in this universe something really cool is about to happen. And if you're really, really lucky and just a million great pieces of luck like lineup in series, sometimes it actually all works out and you get to be part of something like this when it does you don't always fully appreciate just how awesome it is from the inside, because you're just there just like feeding the machine and you are just doing your job just as fast as you possibly can. And in my case, it was listening to teams and writing blog posts about their launches and sharing them on social media, going out and speaking, you do it, you do it as quickly as possible. You're kind of running your whole life as you're doing that as well. And suddenly you just take a little step back and say, wow we did this kind of amazing thing, but we don't tend to like relax and say, okay, we've done it at Amazon. We get to a certain point. We recognize it. And five minutes later, we're like, okay, let's do the next amazingly good thing. But it's been this just unique privilege and something that I never thought I'd be fortunate enough to be a part of. >> Well, then the last few minutes we have Jeff I really appreciate you taking the time to spend with us for this inaugural launch of theCUBE on cloud startup showcase. We are showcasing 10 startups here from your ecosystem. And a lot of people who know AWS for the folks that don't you guys pride yourself on community and ecosystem the global startups program that Jeremy and his team are running. You guys nurture these startups. You want them to be successful. They're vectoring out into the marketplace with growth strategy, helping customers. What's your take on this ecosystem? As customers are out there listening to this what's your advice to them? How should they engage? Why is these sets of start-ups so important? >> Well, I totally love startups and I've spent time in several startups. I've spent other time consulting with them. And I think we're in this incredible time now wheres, it's so easy and straightforward to get those basic resources, to get your compute, to get your storage, to get your databases, to get your machine learning and to take that and to really focus on your customers and to build what you want. And we see this actual exponential growth. And we see these startups that find something to do. They listen to one of their customers, they build that solution. And they're just that feedback cycle gets started. It's really incredible. And I love to see the energy of these startups. I love to hear from them. And at any point if we've got an AWS powered startup and they build something awesome and want to share it with me, I'm all ears. I love to hear about them. Emails, Twitter mentions, whatever I'll just love to hear about all this energy all those great success with our startups. >> Jeff Barr, thank you for coming on. And congratulations, please pass on to Andy Jassy who's going to take over for Jeff Bezos and I saw the big news that he's picking a successor an Amazonian coming back into the fold, Adam. So congratulations on that. >> I will definitely pass on your congratulations to Andy and I worked with Adam in the past when AWS was just getting started and really looking forward to seeing him again, welcoming back and working with him. >> All right, Jeff Barr with AWS guys check out his Twitter and all the social coordinates. He is pumping out all the resources you need to know about if you're a developer or you're an enterprise looking to go to the next level, next generation, modern infrastructure. Thanks Jeff for coming on. Really appreciate it. Our next guests want to bring up stage Michael Liebow from McKinsey cube alumni, who is a great guest who is very timely in his McKinsey role with a paper he and his colleagues put out called cloud's trillion dollar prize up for grabs. Michael, thank you for coming up on stage with Dave and I. >> Hey, great to be here, John. Thank you. >> One of the things I loved about this and why I wanted you to come on was not only is the report awesome. And Dave has got a zillion questions, he want us to drill into. But in 2015, we wrote a story called Andy Jassy trillion dollar baby on Forbes, and then on medium and silken angle where we were the first ones to profile Andy Jassy and talk about this trillion dollar term. And Dave came up with the calculation and people thought we were crazy. What are you talking about trillion dollar opportunity. That was in 2015. You guys have put this together with a serious research report with methodology and you left a lot on the table. I noticed in the report you didn't even have a whole section quantified. So I think just scratching the surface trillion. I'd be a little light, Dave, so let's dig into it, Michael thanks for coming on. >> Well, and I got to say, Michael that John's a trillion dollar baby was revenue. Yours is EBITDA. So we're talking about seven to X, seven to eight X. What we were talking back then, but great job on the report. Fantastic work. >> Thank you. >> So tell us about the report gives a quick lowdown. I got some questions. You guys are unlocking the value drivers but give us a quick overview of this report that people can get for free. So everyone who's registered will get a copy but give us a quick rundown. >> Great. Well the question I think that has bothered all of us for a long time is what's the business value of cloud and how do you quantify it? How do you specify it? Because a lot of people talk around the infrastructure or technical value of cloud but that actually is a big problem because it just scratches the surface of the potential of what cloud can mean. And we focus around the fortune 500. So we had to box us in somewhat. And so focusing on the fortune 500 and fast forwarding to 2030, we put out this number that there's over a trillion dollars worth of value. And we did a lot of analysis using research from a variety of partners, using third-party research, primary research in order to come up with this view. So the business value is two X the technical value of cloud. And as you just pointed out, there is a whole unlock of additional value where organizations can pioneer on some of the newest technologies. And so AWS and others are creating platforms in order to do not just machine learning and analytics and IOT, but also for quantum or mixed reality for blockchain. And so organizations specific around the fortune 500 that aren't leveraging these capabilities today are going to get left behind. And that's the message we were trying to deliver that if you're not doing this and doing this with purpose and with great execution, that others, whether it's others in your industry or upstarts who were motioning into your industry, because as you say cloud democratizes compute, it provides these capabilities and small companies with talent. And that's what the skills can leverage these capabilities ahead of slow moving incumbents. And I think that was the critical component. So that gives you the framework. We can deep dive based on your questions. >> Well before we get into the deep dive, I want to ask you we have startups being showcased here as part of the, it will showcase, they're coming out of the ecosystem. They have a lot of certification from Amazon and they're secure, which is a big issue. Enterprises that you guys talk to McKinsey speaks directly to I call the boardroom CXOs, the top executives. Are they realizing that the scale and timing of this agility window? I mean, you want to go through these key areas that you would break out but as startups become more relevant the boardrooms that are making these big decisions realize that their businesses are up for grabs. Do they realize that all this wealth is shifting? And do they see the role of startups helping them? How did you guys come out of them and report on that piece? >> Well in terms of the whole notion, we came up with this framework which looked at the opportunity. We talked about it in terms of three dimensions, rejuvenate, innovate and pioneer. And so from the standpoint of a board they're more than focused on not just efficiency and cost reduction basically tied to nation, but innovation tied to analytics tied to machine learning, tied to IOT, tied to two key attributes of cloud speed and scale. And one of the things that we did in the paper was leverage case examples from across industry, across-region there's 17 different case examples. My three favorite is one is Moderna. So software for life couldn't have delivered the vaccine as fast as they did without cloud. My second example was Goldman Sachs got into consumer banking is the platform behind the Apple card couldn't have done it without leveraging cloud. And the third example, particularly in early days of the pandemic was Zoom that added five to 6,000 servers a night in order to scale to meet the demand. And so all three of those examples, plus the other 14 just indicate in business terms what the potential is and to convince boards and the C-suite that if you're not doing this, and we have some recommendations in terms of what CEOs should do in order to leverage this but to really take advantage of those capabilities. >> Michael, I think it's important to point out the approach at sometimes it gets a little wonky on the methodology but having done a lot of these types of studies and observed there's a lot of superficial studies out there, a lot of times people will do, they'll go I'll talk to a customer. What kind of ROI did you get? And boom, that's the value study. You took a different approach. You have benchmark data, you talked to a lot of companies. You obviously have a lot of financial data. You use some third-party data, you built models, you bounded it. And ultimately when you do these things you have to ascribe a value contribution to the cloud component because fortunate 500 companies are going to grow even if there were no cloud. And the way you did that is again, you talk to people you model things, and it's a very detailed study. And I think it's worth pointing out that this was not just hey what'd you get from going to cloud before and after. This was a very detailed deep dive with really a lot of good background work going into it. >> Yeah, we're very fortunate to have the McKinsey Global Institute which has done extensive studies in these areas. So there was a base of knowledge that we could leverage. In fact, we looked at over 700 use cases across 19 industries in order to unpack the value that cloud contributed to those use cases. And so getting down to that level of specificity really, I think helps build it from the bottom up and then using cloud measures or KPIs that indicate the value like how much faster you can deploy, how much faster you can develop. So these are things that help to kind of inform the overall model. >> Yeah. Again, having done hundreds, if not thousands of these types of things, when you start talking to people the patterns emerge, I want to ask you there's an exhibit tool in here, which is right on those use cases, retail, healthcare, high-tech oil and gas banking, and a lot of examples. And I went through them all and virtually every single one of them from a value contribution standpoint the unlocking value came down to data large data sets, document analysis, converting sentiment analysis, analytics. I mean, it really does come down to the data. And I wonder if you could comment on that and why is it that cloud is enabled that? >> Well, it goes back to scale. And I think the word that I would use would be data gravity because we're talking about massive amounts of data. So as you go through those kind of three dimensions in terms of rejuvenation one of the things you can do as you optimize and clarify and build better resiliency the thing that comes into play I think is to have clean data and data that's available in multiple places that you can create an underlying platform in order to leverage the services, the capabilities around, building out that structure. >> And then if I may, so you had this again I want to stress as EBITDA. It's not a revenue and it's the EBITDA potential as a result of leveraging cloud. And you listed a number of industries. And I wonder if you could comment on the patterns that you saw. I mean, it doesn't seem to be as simple as Negroponte bits versus Adam's in terms of your ability to unlock value. What are the patterns that you saw there and why are the ones that have so much potential why are they at the top of the list? >> Well, I mean, they're ranked based on impact. So the five greatest industries and again, aligned by the fortune 500. So it's interesting when you start to unpack it that way high-tech oil, gas, retail, healthcare, insurance and banking, right? Top. And so we did look at the different solutions that were in that, tried to decipher what was fully unlocked by cloud, what was accelerated by cloud and what was perhaps in this timeframe remaining on premise. And so we kind of step by step, expert by expert, use case by use case deciphered of the 700, how that applied. >> So how should practitioners within organizations business but how should they use this data? What would you recommend, in terms of how they think about it, how they apply it to their business, how they communicate? >> Well, I think clearly what came out was a set of best practices for what organizations that were leveraging cloud and getting the kind of business return, three things stood out, execution, experience and excellence. And so for under execution it's not just the transaction, you're not just buying cloud you're changing their operating model. And so if the organization isn't kind of retooling the model, the processes, the workflows in order to support creating the roles then they aren't going to be able, they aren't going to be successful. In terms of experience, that's all about hands-on. And so you have to dive in, you have to start you have to apply yourself, you have to gain that applied knowledge. And so if you're not gaining that experience, you're not going to move forward. And then in terms of excellence, and it was mentioned earlier by Jeff re-skilling, up-skilling, if you're not committed to your workforce and pushing certification, pushing training in order to really evolve your workforce or your ways of working you're not going to leverage cloud. So those three best practices really came up on top in terms of what a mature cloud adopter looks like. >> That's awesome. Michael, thank you for coming on. Really appreciate it. Last question I have for you as we wrap up this trillion dollar segment upon intended is the cloud mindset. You mentioned partnering and scaling up. The role of the enterprise and business is to partner with the technologists, not just the technologies but the companies talk about this cloud native mindset because it's not just lift and shift and run apps. And I have an IT optimization issue. It's about innovating next gen solutions and you're seeing it in public sector. You're seeing it in the commercial sector, all areas where the relationship with partners and companies and startups in particular, this is the startup showcase. These are startups are more relevant than ever as the tide is shifting to a new generation of companies. >> Yeah, so a lot of think about an engine. A lot of things have to work in order to produce the kind of results that we're talking about. Brad, you're more than fair share or unfair share of trillion dollars. And so CEOs need to lead this in bold fashion. Number one, they need to craft the moonshot or the Marshot. They have to set that goal, that aspiration. And it has to be a stretch goal for the organization because cloud is the only way to enable that achievement of that aspiration that's number one, number two, they really need a hardheaded economic case. It has to be defined in terms of what the expectation is going to be. So it's not loose. It's very, very well and defined. And in some respects time box what can we do here? I would say the cloud data, your organization has to move in an agile fashion training DevOps, and the fourth thing, and this is where the startups come in is the cloud platform. There has to be an underlying platform that supports those aspirations. It's an art, it's not just an architecture. It's a living, breathing live service with integrations, with standardization, with self service that enables this whole program. >> Awesome, Michael, thank you for coming on and sharing the McKinsey perspective. The report, the clouds trillion dollar prize is up for grabs. Everyone who's registered for this event will get a copy. We will appreciate it's also on the website. We'll make sure everyone gets a copy. Thanks for coming, I appreciate it. Thank you. >> Thanks, Michael. >> Okay, Dave, big discussion there. Trillion dollar baby. That's the cloud. That's Jassy. Now he's going to be the CEO of AWS. They have a new CEO they announced. So that's going to be good for Amazon's kind of got clarity on the succession to Jassy, trusted soldier. The ecosystem is big for Amazon. Unlike Microsoft, they have the different view, right? They have some apps, but they're cultivating as many startups and enterprises as possible in the cloud. And no better reason to change gears here and get a venture capitalist in here. And a friend of theCUBE, Jerry Chen let's bring them up on stage. Jerry Chen, great to see you partner at Greylock making all the big investments. Good to see you >> John hey, Dave it's great to be here with you guys. Happy marks.Can you see that? >> Hey Jerry, good to see you man >> So Jerry, our first inaugural AWS startup showcase we'll be doing these quarterly and we're going to be featuring the best of the best, you're investing in all the hot startups. We've been tracking your careers from the beginning. You're a good friend of theCUBE. Always got great commentary. Why are startups more important than ever before? Because in the old days we've talked about theCUBE before startups had to go through certain certifications and you've got tire kicking, you got to go through IT. It's like going through security at the airport, take your shoes off, put your belt on thing. I mean, all kinds of things now different. The world has changed. What's your take? >> I think startups have always been a great way for experimentation, right? It's either new technologies, new business models, new markets they can move faster, the experiment, and a lot of startups don't work, unfortunately, but a lot of them turned to be multi-billion dollar companies. I thing startup is more important because as we come out COVID and economy is recovery is a great way for individuals, engineers, for companies for different markets to try different things out. And I think startups are running multiple experiments at the same time across the globe trying to figure how to do things better, faster, cheaper. >> And McKinsey points out this use case of rejuvenate, which is essentially retool pivot essentially get your costs down or and the next innovation here where there's Tam there's trillion dollars on unlock value and where the bulk of it is is the innovation, the new use cases and existing new use cases. This is where the enterprises really have an opportunity. Could you share your thoughts as you invest in the startups to attack these new waves these new areas where it may not look the same as before, what's your assessment of this kind of innovation, these new use cases? >> I think we talked last time about kind of changing the COVID the past year and there's been acceleration of things like how we work, education, medicine all these things are going online. So I think that's very clear. The first wave of innovation is like, hey things we didn't think we could be possible, like working remotely, e-commerce everywhere, telemedicine, tele-education, that's happening. I think the second order of fact now is okay as enterprises realize that this is the new reality everything is digital, everything is in the cloud and everything's going to be more kind of electronic relation with the customers. I think that we're rethinking what does it mean to be a business? What does it mean to be a bank? What does it mean to be a car company or an energy company? What does it mean to be a retailer? Right? So I think the rethinking that brands are now global, brands are all online. And they now have relationships with the customers directly. So I think if you are a business now, you have to re experiment or rethink about your business model. If you thought you were a Nike selling shoes to the retailers, like half of Nike's revenue is now digital right all online. So instead of selling sneakers through stores they're now a direct to consumer brand. And so I think every business is going to rethink about what the AR. Airbnb is like are they in the travel business or the experience business, right? Airlines, what business are they in? >> Yeah, theCUBE we're direct to consumer virtual totally opened up our business model. Dave, the cloud premise is interesting now. I mean, let's reset this where we are, right? Andy Jassy always talks about the old guard, new guard. Okay we've been there done that, even though they still have a lot of Oracle inside AWS which we were joking the other day, but this new modern era coming out of COVID Jerry brings this up. These startups are going to be relevant take territory down in the enterprises as new things develop. What's your premise of the cloud and AWS prospect? >> Well, so Jerry, I want to to ask you. >> Jerry: Yeah. >> The other night, last Thursday, I think we were in Clubhouse. Ben Horowitz was on and Martine Casado was laying out this sort of premise about cloud startups saying basically at some point they're going to have to repatriate because of the Amazon VIG. I mean, I'm paraphrasing and I guess the premise was that there's this variable cost that grows as you scale but I kind of shook my head and I went back. You saw, I put it out on Twitter a clip that we had the a couple of years ago and I don't think, I certainly didn't see it that way. Maybe I'm getting it wrong but what's your take on that? I just don't see a snowflake ever saying, okay we're going to go build our own data center or we're going to repatriate 'cause they're going to end up like service now and have this high cost infrastructure. What do you think? >> Yeah, look, I think Martin is an old friend from VMware and he's brilliant. He has placed a lot of insights. There is some insights around, at some point a scale, use of startup can probably run things more cost-effectively in your own data center, right? But I think that's fewer companies more the vast majority, right? At some point, but number two, to your point, Dave going on premise versus your own data center are two different things. So on premise in a customer's environment versus your own data center are two different worlds. So at some point some scale, a lot of the large SaaS companies run their own data centers that makes sense, Facebook and Google they're at scale, they run their own data centers, going on premise or customer's environment like a fortune 100 bank or something like that. That's a different story. There are reasons to do that around compliance or data gravity, Dave, but Amazon's costs, I don't think is a legitimate reason. Like if price is an issue that could be solved much faster than architectural decisions or tech stacks, right? Once you're on the cloud I think the thesis, the conversation we had like a year ago was the way you build apps are very different in the cloud and the way built apps on premise, right? You have assume storage, networking and compute elasticity that's independent each other. You don't really get that in a customer's data center or their own environment even with all the new technologies. So you can't really go from cloud back to on-premise because the way you build your apps look very, very different. So I would say for sure at some scale run your own data center that's why the hyperscale guys do that. On-premise for customers, data gravity, compliance governance, great reasons to go on premise but for vast majority of startups and vast majority of customers, the network effects you get for being in the cloud, the network effects you get from having everything in this alas cloud service I think outweighs any of the costs. >> I couldn't agree more and that's where the data is, at the way I look at it is your technology spend is going to be some percentage of revenue and it's going to be generally flat over time and you're going to have to manage it whether it's in the cloud or it's on prem John. >> Yeah, we had a quote on theCUBE on the conscious that had Jerry I want to get your reaction to this. The executive said, if you don't have an AI strategy built into your value proposition you will be shorted as a stock on wall street. And I even went further. So you'll probably be delisted cause you won't be performing with a tongue in cheek comment. But the reality is that that's indicating that everyone has to have AI in their thing. Mainly as a reality, what's your take on that? I know you've got a lot of investments in this area as AI becomes beyond fashion and becomes table stakes. Where are we on that spectrum? And how does that impact business and society as that becomes a key part of the stack and application stack? >> Yeah, I think John you've seen AI machine learning turn out to be some kind of novelty thing that a bunch of CS professors working on years ago to a funnel piece of every application. So I would say the statement of the sentiment's directionally correct that 20 years ago if you didn't have a web strategy or a website as a company, your company be sure it, right? If you didn't have kind of a internet website, you weren't real company. Likewise, if you don't use AI now to power your applications or machine learning in some form or fashion for sure you'd be at a competitive disadvantage to everyone else. And just like if you're not using software intelligently or the cloud intelligently your stock as a company is going to underperform the rest of the market. And the cloud guys on the startups that we're backing are making AI so accessible and so easy for developers today that it's really easy to use some level of machine learning, any applications, if you're not doing that it's like not having a website in 1999. >> Yeah. So let's get into that whole operation side. So what would you be your advice to the enterprises that are watching and people who are making decisions on architecture and how they roll out their business model or value proposition? How should they look at AI and operations? I mean big theme is day two operations. You've got IT service management, all these things are being disrupted. What's the operational impact to this? What's your view on that? >> So I think two things, one thing that you and Dave both talked about operation is the key, I mean, operations is not just the guts of the business but the actual people running the business, right? And so we forget that one of the values are going to cloud, one of the values of giving these services is you not only have a different technology stack, all the bits, you have a different human stack meaning the people running your cloud, running your data center are now effectively outsource to Amazon, Google or Azure, right? Which I think a big part of the Amazon VIG as Dave said, is so eloquently on Twitter per se, right? You're really paying for those folks like carry pagers. Now take that to the next level. Operations is human beings, people intelligently trying to figure out how my business can run better, right? And that's either accelerate revenue or decrease costs, improve my margin. So if you want to use machine learning, I would say there's two areas to think about. One is how I think about customers, right? So we both talked about the amount of data being generated around enterprise individuals. So intelligently use machine learning how to serve my customers better, then number two AI and machine learning internally how to run my business better, right? Can I take cost out? Can I optimize supply chain? Can I use my warehouses more efficiently my logistics more efficiently? So one is how do I use AI learning to be a more familiar more customer oriented and number two, how can I take cost out be more efficient as a company, by writing AI internally from finance ops, et cetera. >> So, Jerry, I wonder if I could ask you a little different subject but a question on tactical valuations how coupled or decoupled are private company valuations from the public markets. You're seeing the public markets everybody's freaking out 'cause interest rates are going to go up. So the future value of cash flows are lower. Does that trickle in quickly into the private markets? Or is it a whole different dynamic? >> If I could weigh in poly for some private markets Dave I would have a different job than I do today. I think the reality is in the long run it doesn't matter as much as long as you're investing early. Now that's an easy answer say, boats have to fall away. Yes, interest rates will probably go up because they're hard to go lower, right? They're effectively almost zero to negative right now in most of the developed world, but at the end of the day, I'm not going to trade my Twilio shares or Salesforce shares for like a 1% yield bond, right? I'm going to hold the high growth tech stocks because regardless of what interest rates you're giving me 1%, 2%, 3%, I'm still going to beat that with a top tech performers, Snowflake, Twilio Hashi Corp, bunch of the private companies out there I think are elastic. They're going to have a great 10, 15 year run. And in the Greylock portfolio like the things we're investing in, I'm super bullish on from Roxanne to Kronos fear, to true era in the AI space. I think in the long run, next 10 years these things will outperform the market that said, right valuation prices have gone up and down and they will in our careers, they have. In the careers we've been covering tech. So I do believe that they're high now they'll come down for sure. Will they go back up again? Definitely, right? But as long as you're betting these macro waves I think we're all be good. >> Great answer as usual. Would you trade them for NFTs Jerry? >> That $69 million people piece of artwork look, I mean, I'm a longterm believer in kind of IP and property rights in the blockchain, right? And I'm waiting for theCUBE to mint this video as the NFT, when we do this guys, we'll mint this video's NFT and see how much people pay for the original Dave, John, Jerry (mumbles). >> Hey, you know what? We can probably get some good bang for that. Hey it's all about this next Jerry. Jerry, great to have you on, final question as we got this one minute left what's your advice to the people out there that either engaging with these innovative startups, we're going to feature startups every quarter from the in the Amazon ecosystem, they are going to be adding value. What's the advice to the enterprises that are engaging startups, the approach, posture, what's your advice. >> Yeah, when I talk to CIOs and large enterprises, they often are wary like, hey, when do I engage a startup? How, what businesses, and is it risky or low risk? Now I say, just like any career managing, just like any investment you're making in a big, small company you should have a budget or set of projects. And then I want to say to a CIO, Hey, every priority on your wish list, go use the startup, right? I mean, that would be 10 for 10 projects, 10 startups. Probably too much risk for a lot of tech companies. But we would say to most CIOs and executives, look, there are strategic initiatives in your business that you want to accelerate. And I would take the time to invest in one or two startups each quarter selectively, right? Use the time, focus on fewer startups, go deep with them because we can actually be game changers in terms of inflecting your business. And what I mean by that is don't pick too many startups because you can't devote the time, but don't pick zero startups because you're going to be left behind, right? It'd be shorted as a stock by the John, Dave and Jerry hedge fund apparently but pick a handful of startups in your strategic areas, in your top tier three things. These really, these could be accelerators for your career. >> I have to ask you real quick while you're here. We've got a couple minutes left on startups that are building apps. I've seen DevOps and the infrastructure as code movement has gone full mainstream. That's really what we're living right now. That kind of first-generation commercialization of DevOps. Now DevSecOps, what are the trends that you've seen that's different from say a couple of years ago now that we're in COVID around how apps are being built? Is it security? Is it the data integration? What can you share as a key app stack impact (mumbles)? >> Yeah, I think there're two things one is security is always been a top priority. I think that was the only going forward period, right? Security for sure. That's why you said that DevOps, DevSecOps like security is often overlooked but I think increasingly could be more important. The second thing is I think we talked about Dave mentioned earlier just the data around customers, the data on premise or the cloud, and there's a ton of data out there. We keep saying this over and over again like data's new oil, et cetera. It's evolving and not changing because the way we're using data finding data is changing in terms of sources of data we're using and discovering and also speed of data, right? In terms of going from Basser real-time is changing. The speed of business has changed to go faster. So I think these are all things that we're thinking about. So both security and how you use your data faster and better. >> Yeah you were in theCUBE a number of years ago and I remember either John or I asked you about you think Amazon is going to go up the stack and start developing applications and your answer was you know what I think no, I think they're going to enable a new set of disruptors to come in and disrupt the SaaS world. And I think that's largely playing out. And one of the interesting things about Adam Selipsky appointment to the CEO, he comes from Tableau. He really helped Tableau go from that sort of old guard model to an ARR model obviously executed a great exit to Salesforce. And now I see companies like Salesforce and service now and Workday is potential for your scenario to really play out. They've got in my view anyway, outdated pricing models. You look at what's how Snowflake's pricing and the consumption basis, same with Datadog same with Stripe and new startups seem to really be a leading into the consumption-based pricing model. So how do you, what are your thoughts on that? And maybe thoughts on Adam and thoughts on SaaS disruption? >> I think my thesis still holds that. I don't think Selipsky Adam is going to go into the app space aggressively. I think Amazon wants to enable next generation apps and seeing some of the new service that they're doing is they're kind of deconstructing apps, right? They're deconstructing the parts of CRM or e-commerce and they're offering them as services. So I think you're going to see Amazon continue to say, hey we're the core parts of an app like payments or custom prediction or some machine learning things around applications you want to buy bacon, they're going to turn those things to the API and sell those services, right? So you look at things like Stripe, Twilio which are two of the biggest companies out there. They're not apps themselves, they're the components of the app, right? Either e-commerce or messaging communications. So I can see Amazon going down that path. I think Adam is a great choice, right? He was a longterm early AWS exact from the early days latent to your point Dave really helped take Tableau into kind of a cloud business acquired by Salesforce work there for a few years under Benioff the guy who created quote unquote cloud and now him coming home again and back to Amazon. So I think it'll be exciting to see how Adam runs the business. >> And John I think he's the perfect choice because he's got operations chops and he knows how to... He can help the startups disrupt. >> Yeah, and he's been a trusted soldier of Jassy from the beginning, he knows the DNA. He's got some CEO outside experience. I think that was the key he knows. And he's not going to give up Amazon speed, but this is baby, right? So he's got him in charge and he's a trusted lieutenant. >> You think. Yeah, you think he's going to hold the mic? >> Yeah. We got to go. Jerry Chen thank you very much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on our inaugural cube on cloud AWS startup event. Now for the 10 startups, enjoy the sessions at 12:30 Pacific, we're going to have the closing keynote. I'm John Ferry for Dave Vellante and our special guests, thanks for watching and enjoy the rest of the day and the 10 startups. (upbeat music)

>>live from San Francisco. It's the queue covering our essay conference 2020 San Francisco Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media >>Hey, welcome back here. Ready? Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're in our 2020 the biggest security conference in the country, if not the world. I guess there's got to be 50,000 people. We'll get the official word tomorrow. It's our sixth year here and we're excited to be back. I'm not sure why. It's 2020. We're supposed to know everything at this point in time with the benefit on inside. We got two people that do. You know a lot. We're excited to have him. My left is Chris Bets is the SVP and chief security officer for Centurylink. Chris, Great to see you. And to his left is Chris Smith, VP Global security Services for Centurylink. Welcome. >>Thank you for having me. >>Absolutely. You guys just flew into town >>just for the conference's great To be here is always a really exciting space with just a ton of new technology coming out. >>So let's just jump into it. What I think is the most interesting and challenging part of this particular show we go to a lot of shows you 100 shows a year. I don't know that there's one that's got kind of the breadth and depth of vendors from the really, really big the really, really small that you have here. And, you know, with the expansion of Moscone, either even packing more women underneath Howard Street, what advice do you give to people who are coming here for the first time? Especially on more than the buyer side as to how do you navigate this place >>when I when I come here and see So I'm always looking at what the new technologies are. But honestly, having a new technology is not good enough. Attackers are coming up with new attacks all the time. The big trick for me is understanding how they integrate into my other solutions. So I'm not so I'm not just focused on the technology. I'm focused on how they all fit together. And so the vendors that have solutions that fit together that really makes a difference in my book. So I'm looking for for products that are designed to work with each other, not just separate >>from a practice standpoint. The theme of IRA say this year is the human element, and for us, if you look at this floor, it's overwhelming. And if you're a CSO of an average enterprise, it's hard to figure out what you need to buy and how to build a practice with all of the emerging tools. So for us core to our practice, I think any mature, 30 security practices having a pro services capability and consulting capability that can be solved this all together, that helps you understand what to buy, what things to piece together and how to make it all work >>right. And it's funny, the human element that is the kind of the global theme. And what's funny is for all the technology it sounds like. Still, the easiest way in is through the person, whether it's a phishing attack or there's a myriad of ways that people are getting him to the human. So that's kind of a special challenge or trying to use technology to help people do a better job. At the end of the day, sometimes you're squishy ISS or easier access point is not a piece of technology, but it's actually a person. It's >>often because We asked people to do the wrong things. We're having them. Focus on security steps. Use email. Security is an easy to grasp example way all go through training every year to teach folks how to make sure that they avoid clicking on the wrong emails for us more often than a year. So the downside of that is arresting people to take a step away from their job and try to figure out how to protect themselves. And is this a bad emails that are really focusing on the job? So that's why it's so important to me to make sure that we've got solutions that help make the human better and frankly, even worse in security. We don't have the staff that we need. And so how do we help Make sure that the right tools are there, that they work together. They automate because asking everybody to take those steps, it's just it's a recipe for disaster because people are going to make mistakes >>right? Let's go a little deeper into the email thing. A friend of mines and commercial real estate, and he was describing an email that he got from his banker describing a wire transfer from one of his suppliers that he has a regular, ongoing making relationship with. You know, it's not the bad pronunciation and bad grammar and kind of the things that used to jump out is an obvious. But he said it was super good to the point where thankfully, you know, it was just this time. But, you know, he called the banker like, did you just send me this thing? So you know where this as the sophistication of the bad guys goes up specifically targeting people, how do you try to keep up with how do you give them the tools to know Woe versus being efficient? I'm trying to get my job done. >>Yeah, for me, it starts with technology. That takes a look. We've only got so many security practitioners in the company. Actually. Defend your email example. We've got to defend every user from those kinds of problems. And so how do I find technology solutions that help take the load off security practitioners so they can focus on the niche examples that really, really well crafted emails and help take that load off user? Because users just not gonna be able to handle that right? It's not fair to ask them. And like you said, it was just poorly time that helped attack. So how do we help? Make sure that we're taking that technology load off, identify the threats in advance and protect them. And so I think one of the biggest things that Chris and I talk a lot about is how to our solutions help make it easier for people to secure themselves instead of just providing only technology technology advantage, >>our strategy for the portfolio and it sort of tied to the complexity. CN This floor is simplicity. So from our perspective, our goal is a network service provider is to deliver threat free traffic to our customers even before it gets to the human being. And we've got an announcement that we launched just a week ago in advance of the show called Rapid Threat Defense. And the idea is to take our mature threat Intel practice that Chris has a team of folks focused on that. We branded black Lotus labs and Way built a machine learning practice that takes all the bad things that we see out in the network and protects customers before it gets to their people. >>So that's an interesting take. You have the benefit of seeing a lot of network traffic from a lot of customers and not just the stuff that's coming into my building. So you get a much more aggregated approach, so tell us a little bit more about that. And what is the Black Lotus Labs doing? And I'm also curious from an industry point of view, you know, it's just a collaboration with the industry cause you guys are doing a lot of traffic. There's other big network providers carrying a lot of traffic. How well do you kind of work together when you identify some nasty new things that you're doing the horizon? And where do you draw the line between better together versus still independent environment? >>When we're talking about making the Internet safer, it's not really to me a lot about competitive environment. It's really about better together. That's one of things I love about the security community. I'm sure you see it every year when you're here. You're talking security practitioners how across every industry security folks work together to accomplish something that's meaningful. So as the largest world's largest global I P we get to see a ton of traffic, and it's really, really interesting we'll be able to put together, you know, at any given point in time. We're watching many tens of thousands of probable malware networks. We're protecting our customers from that. But we're also able to ourselves take down nearly 65 now where networks every month just knock them off the Internet. So identify the command and control, and we take it off the Internet. We work with our partners. We go talk to hosting providers, maybe competitors of ours. And we say, Hey, here's a bad, bad actors bad server that's being used to control now where? Going shut it down. And so the result of that is not only protecting our customers, but more importantly, protecting tens of thousands of customers every month. By removing now where networks that were attacking, that really makes a difference. To me, that's the biggest impact we bring. And so it really is a better together. It's a collaboration story and, of course, for said, we get the benefit of that information as we're developing it as we're building it, we can protect our customers right away while we're building the confidence necessary to take something as dramatic and action as shutting down on our network. Right. Unilaterally, >>Citrix. I was gonna ask you kind of the impact of I o t. Right in this in this crazy expansion of the tax services, when you hear about all the time with my favorite example, somebody told the story of attacking a casino through the connected thermometer in the fish tank in the lobby, which may or may not be true, is still a great story. Great story. But I'm curious, you know, looking at the network, feeding versus the devices connecting that's really in an interesting way to attack this proliferation of attack services. You're getting it before it necessarily gets to all these new points of presence doing it based on the source. For >>us, that's the only way to make it scalable. It is true that automation blocking it before it gets to the azure to a device. It is what will create simplicity and value for our customers. >>Right on the other piece of the automation. Of course, that we hear about all the time is there just aren't enough security professionals, period. So if you don't have the automation. You don't have the machine learning, as you said, to filter low hanging fruit and the focus your resource. If they need to be, you're not going to do it. The bad news is the bad guys, similar tools. So as you look at kind of the increase in speed of automation, the increase in automated connectivity between these devices making decisions amongst each other, how do you see that kind of evolving? But you're kind of role and making sure you stay a step ahead of the bad guys. For >>me, it's not about just automation. It's about allowing smart people to put their brains against hard problems, hard impactful problems and so on. So simply automating is not enough. It's making sure that automation is reducing the the load on people so that they're able to focus on those hard, unique problems really solve all those solutions and, yes, Attackers, Attackers build automation as well. And so if we're not building faster and better than we're falling behind, so like every other part of this race, it's about getting better, faster and why it's so important that technology work together because we're constantly throwing out more tools and if they don't work better together, even if we got incremental automation, these place way still miss overall because it's end to end that we need to defend ourselves and our customers >>layered on what he said. For the foreseeable future, you're gonna need smart security people that help protect your practice. Our goal in automation is take the road tasks out of out of the gate. They live so they can focus on the things that provide the most value protecting their enterprise. >>Right when you're looking, you talked about making sure things work together, for you talked about making sure things work together. How do you decide what's kind of on the top of the top of the stack, where everybody wants to own the single pane of glass? Everybody wants to be the control plane. Everybody wants to be that thing that's on your computer all the time, which is how you work your day to day. How do you kind of dictate what are the top level tools while still going out? And, he said, exploring some of these really cutting edge things out around the fringe, which don't necessarily have a full stack solution that you're going to rely on but might have some cool kind of point solutions if you will, or point products to help you plug some new and emerging holes. Yeah, >>yeah. So for us, yeah, we take security capabilities and we build them into the other things that we sell. So it's not a bolt on. So when you buy things from us, whether whether it's bandwidth or whether its SD wan and security comes baked in, so it's not something you have to worry about integrating later. It's an ingredient of the things that we sell in all of the automation that we build is built into our practice, So it's simple for our customers to understand, like, simple and then layered. On top of that, we've got a couple different ways that we bring pro services and consulting to our practice. So we've got a smart group of folks that could lean into staff, augment and sit on site, do just about anything to help customers build a practice from day zero to something more mature. But now we're toying with taking those folks in building them into products and services that we sell for 10 or 20 hours a month as an ingredient. So you get that consulting wrapper on top of the portfolio that we sell as a service provider. >>Get your take on kind of budgets and how people should think about their budgets. And when I think of security, I can't help but think of like insurance because you can't spend all your money on security. But you want to spend the right amount on security. But at the end of the day, you can't be 100% secure, right? So it's kind of kind of working the margins game, and you have to make trade offs in marketing, wants their money and product development, wants their money and sales, wants their money. So what people are trying to assess kind of the risk in their investment trade offs. What are some of the things they should be thinking about to determine what is the proper investment on security? Because it can't just be, you know, locker being 100% it's not realistic, and then all the money they help people frame that. >>Usually when companies come to us in, Centurylink plays in every different segment, all the way down to, you know, five people company all the way to the biggest multinationals on the planet. So that question is, in the budget is a little bit different, depending on the type of customer, the maturity and the lens are looking at it. So, typically, way have a group of folks that we call security account managers those our consultants and we bring them in either in a dedicated or a shared way. Help companies that's us, wear their practices today in what tool sets for use again things that they need to purchase and integrate to get to where they need to be >>really kind of a needs analysis based on gaps as much as anything else. >>That's part of the reason why we try to build prisons earlier, so many of the technologies into our solution so that so that you buy, you know, SD wan from us, and you get a security story is part of it is that that allows you to use the customer to save money and really have one seamless solution that provides that secure experience. We've been building firewalls and doing network based security for going on two decades now, in different places. So at this point, that is a good place that way, understand? Well, we can apply automation against it. We can dump, tail it into existing services and then allow focused on other areas of security. So it helps. From a financial standpoint, it also helps customers understand from where they put their talent. Because, as you talked about, it's all about talents even more so than money. Yes, we need to watch our budgets. But if you buy these tools, how do you know about the talent to deploy them? And easier You could make it to do that simpler. I think the better off right >>typical way had the most success selling security practices when somebody is either under attacker compromised right, then the budget opens right up, and it's not a problem anymore. So we thought about how to solve that commercially, and I'll just use Vitas is an example. We have a big D dos global DDOS practice that's designed to protect customers that have applications out on the Internet that are business critical, and if they go down, whether it's an e commerce or a trading site losing millions of dollars a day, and some companies have the money to buy that up front and just have it as a service. And some companies don't purchase it from us until they're under attack. And the legacy telco way of deploying that service was an order and a quote. You know, some days later, we turned it up. So we've invested with Christine the whole orchestration layer to turn it up in minutes and that months so you can go to our portal. You can enter a few simple commercial terms and turn it on when you need it. >>That's interesting. I was gonna ask you kind of how has cloud kind of changed the whole go to market and the way people think about it. And even then you hear people have stuff that's secure in the cloud, but they mis configured a switch left something open. But you're saying, too it enables you to deploy in a very, very different matter based on you know, kind of business conditions and not have that old, you know, get a requisite get a p o requisition order, install config. Take on another kind of crazy stuff. Okay, so before I let you go, last question. What are your kind of priorities for this show for Centurylink when it's top of mind, Obviously, you have the report and the Black Lotus. What do you guys really prioritizing for this next week? Here for Cisco. >>We're here to help customers. We have a number of customers, a lot of learning about our solutions, and that's always my priority. And I mentioned earlier we just put out a press release for rapid threat defense. So we're here to talk about that, and I think the industry and what we're doing this little bit differently. >>I get to work with Chris Motions Week with customers, which is kind of fun. The other part that I'm really excited about, things we spent a bunch of time with partners and potential partners. We're always looking at how we bring more, better together. So one of the things that we're both focused on is making sure that we're able to provide more solutions. So the trick is finding the right partners who are ready to do a P I level integration. The other things that Chris was talking about that really make this a seamless and experience, and I think we've got a set of them that are really, really interested in that. And so those conversations this week will be exceptionally well, I think that's gonna help build better technology for our customers even six months. >>Alright, great. Well, thanks for kicking off your week with the Cube and have a terrific week. Alright. He's Chris. He's Chris. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. Where? The RSA Conference in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. See you next time. >>Yeah, yeah.

[Music] Andre one of the things that have come up is your relation with Russia as we talked about so I have to ask you a direct question do you to work with sanctioned Russian entities or Russian companies shown we and c5 we do not work with any company that's sanctioned from any country including Russia and the same applies to me we take sanctions very very seriously the one thing you don't mess with is US sanctions which has application worldwide and so you always have to stay absolutely on the right side of the law when it comes to sanctions so nothing nothing that's something that's connection nets are trying to make they're also the other connection is a guy named Victor Vail Selberg Viktor Vekselberg Vekselberg to go with the Russian names as people know what is your relationship with Viktor Vekselberg so victim Viktor Vekselberg is a is a very well known Russian businessman he's perhaps one of the best known Russian businessman in the West because he also lived in the US for a period of time it's a very well-known personality in in in Europe he's a donor for example to the Clinton Foundation and he has aggregated the largest collection of Faberge eggs in the world as part of national Russian treasure so he's a very well known business personality and of course during the course of my career which has focused heavily on also doing investigations on Russian related issues I have come across Viktor Vekselberg and I've had the opportunity to meet with him and so I know him as a as a business leader but c5 has no relationship with Viktor Vekselberg and we've never accepted any investment from him we've never asked him for an investment and our firm a venture capital firm has no ties to Viktor Vekselberg so you've worked had a relationship at some point in your career but no I wouldn't on a daily basis you don't have a deep relationship can you explain how deep that relationship is what were the interactions you had with him so clarify that point so so I know Viktor Vekselberg and I've met him on more than one occasion in different settings and as I shared with you I served on the board of a South African mining company which is black owned for a period of a year and which Renova had a minority investment alongside an Australian company called South 32 and that's the extent of the contact and exposure I've had to so casual business run-ins and interactions not like again that's correct deep joint ventures are very kind of okay let's get back to c5 for a minute cause I want to ask you it but just do just a circle just one last issue and Viktor Vekselberg Viktor Vekselberg is the chairman of scope over the Russian technology innovation park that we discussed and he became the chairman under the presidency of President Dmitry Medvedev during the time when Hillary Clinton was doing a reset on Russian relations and during that time so vekselberg have built up very effective relationships with all of the or many of the leading big US technology companies and today you can find the roster of those partners the list of those partners on the scope of our website and those nuclear drove that yes Victor drove that Victor drove that during during in the Clinton Secretary of this started the scope of our project started during the the Medvedev presidency and in the period 2010-2011 you'll find many photographs of mr. vekselberg signing partnership agreements with very well known technology companies for Skolkovo and most of those companies still in one way or another remain involved in the Skolkovo project this has been the feature the article so there are I think and I've read all the other places where they wanted to make this decision Valley of Russia correct there's a lot of Russian programmers who work for American companies I know a few of them that do so there's technology they get great programmers in Russia but certainly they have technology so oracles they're ibm's they're cisco say we talked about earlier there is US presence there are you do you have a presence there and does Amazon Web service have a presence on do you see five it and that's knowing I was alright it's well it's a warning in the wrong oh sorry about that what's the Skog Obama's called spoke over so Andres Kokomo's this has been well report it's the Silicon Valley of Russia and so a lot of American companies they're IBM Oracle Cisco you mentioned earlier I can imagine it makes sense they a lot of recruiting little labs going on we see people hire Russian engineers all the time you know c5 have a presence there and does AWS have a presence there and do you work together in a TBS in that area explain that relationship certainly c5 Amazon individually or you can't speak for Amazon but let's see if I've have there and do you work with Amazon in any way there c-5m there's no work in Russia and neither does any of our portfolio companies c5 has no relationship with the Skolkovo Technology Park and as I said the parties for this spoke of a Technology Park is a matter of record is only website anyone can take a look at it and our name is not amongst those partners and I think this was this is an issue which I which I fault the BBC report on because if the BBC report was fair and accurate they would have disclosed the fact that there's a long list of partners with a scope of our project very well known companies many of them competitors in the Jedi process but that was not the case the BBC programme in a very misleading and deceptive way created the impression that for some reason somehow c5 was involved in Skolkovo without disclosing the fact that many other companies are involved they and of course we are not involved and your only relationship with Declan Berg Viktor Vekselberg was through the c5 raiser bid three c5 no no Viktor Vekselberg was never involved in c5 raiser Petco we had Vladimir Kuznetsov as a man not as a minority investor day and when we diligence him one of our key findings was that he was acting in independent capacity and he was investing his own money as a you national aniseh Swiss resident so you if you've had no business dealings with Viktor Vekselberg other than casual working c-5 has had no business dealings with with Viktor Vekselberg in a in a personal capacity earlier before the onset of sanctions I served on the board of a black-owned South African mining company and which Renault bombs the Vekselberg company as a minority investment alongside an Australian company called South 32 and my motivation for doing so was to support African entrepreneurship because this was one of the first black owned mining companies in the country was established with a British investment in which I was involved in and I was very supportive of the work that this company does to develop manganese mining in the Kalahari Desert and your role there was advisory formal what was the role there it was an advisory role so no ownership no ownership no equity no engagement you call them to help out on a project I was asked to support the company at the crucial time when they had a dispute on royalties when they were looking at the future of the Kalahari basin and the future of the manganese reserve say and also to help the company through a transition of the black leadership the black executive leadership of the cut year is that roughly 2017 so recently okay let on the ownership of c5 can you explain who owns c5 I mean you're described as the owner if it's a venture capital firm you probably of investors so your managing director you probably have some carry of some sort and then talk about the relationship between c5 razor bidco the Russian special purpose vehicle that was created is that owning what does it fit is it a subordinate role so see my capital so Jones to start with c5 razor boot code was was never a Russian special purpose vehicle this was a British special purpose vehicle which we established for our own investment into a European enterprise software company vladimir kuznetsov later invested as an angel investor into the same company and we required him to do it through our structure because it was transparent and subject to FCA regulation there's no ties back to c5 he's been not an owner in any way of c5 no not on c5 so C fibers owned by five families who helped to establish the business and grow the business and partner in the business these are blue chip very well known European and American families it's a small transatlantic community or family investors who believe that it's important to use private capital for the greater good right history dealing with Russians can you talk about your career you mentioned your career in South Africa earlier talk about your career deal in Russia when did you start working with Russian people I was the international stage Russian Russia's that time in 90s and 2000 and now certainly has changed a lot let's talk about your history and deal with the Russians so percent of the Soviet Union I think there was a significant window for Western investment into Russia and Western investment during this time also grew very significantly during my career as an investigator I often dealt with Russian organized crime cases and in fact I established my consulting business with a former head of the Central European division of the CIA who was an expert on Russia and probably one of the world's leading experts on Russia so to get his name William Lofgren so during the course of of building this business we helped many Western investors with problems and issues related to their investments in Russia so you were working for the West I was waiting for the West so you are the good side and but when you were absolutely and when and when you do work of this kind of course you get to know a lot of people in Russia and you make Russian contacts and like in any other country as as Alexander Solzhenitsyn the great Russian dissident wrote the line that separates good and evil doesn't run between countries it runs through the hearts of people and so in this context there are there are people in Russia who crossed my path and across my professional career who were good people who were working in a constructive way for Russia's freedom and for Russia's independence and that I continue to hold in high regard and you find there's no technical security risk the United States of America with your relationship with c5 and Russia well my my investigative work that related to Russia cases are all in the past this was all done in the past as you said I was acting in the interest of Western corporations and Western governments in their relations with Russia that's documented and you'd be prepared to be transparent about that absolutely that's all those many of those cases are well documented to corporations for which my consulting firm acted are very well known very well known businesses and it's pretty much all on the on the Podesta gaiting corruption we were we were we were helping Western corporations invest into Russia in a way that that that meant that they did not get in meshed in corruption that meant they didn't get blackmailed by Russia organized crime groups which meant that their investments were sustainable and compliant with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and other bribery regulation at war for everyone who I know that lives in Europe that's my age said when the EU was established there's a flight of Eastern Europeans and Russians into Western Europe and they don't have the same business practices so I'd imagine you'd run into some pretty seedy scenarios in this course of business well in drug-dealing under I mean a lot of underground stuff was going on they're different they're different government they're different economy I mean it wasn't like a structure so you probably were exposed to a lot many many post-conflict countries suffer from predatory predatory organized crime groups and I think what changed and of course of my invested investigative career was that many of these groups became digital and a lot of organized crime that was purely based in the physical world went into the into the digital world which was one of the other major reasons which led me to focus on cyber security and to invest in cyber security well gets that in a minute well that's great I may only imagine some of the things you're investigated it's easy to connect people with things when yeah things are orbiting around them so appreciate the candid response there I wanna move on to the other area I see in the stories national security risk conflict of interest in some of the stories you seeing this well is there conflict of interest this is an IT playbook I've seen over the years federal deals well you're gonna create some Fahd fear uncertainty and doubt there's always kind of accusations you know there's accusations around well are they self dealing and you know these companies or I've seen this before so I gotta ask you they're involved with you bought a company called s DB advisors it was one of the transactions that they're in I see connecting to in my research with the DoD Sally Donnelly who is Sally Donnelly why did you buy her business so I didn't buy Sonny Donnelly's business again so Sally Tony let's start with Sally darling so Sally Donny was introduced to me by Apple Mike Mullen as a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Sally served as his special advisor when he was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Apple Mullen was one of the first operating parties which we had in c5 and he continues to serve Admiral Mullen the four start yes sir okay and he continues to serve as one of operating partners to this day salad only and that will Mike worked very closely with the Duke of Westminster on one of his charitable projects which we supported and which is close to my heart which is established a new veteran rehabilitation center for Britain upgrading our facility which dates back to the Second World War which is called Headley court to a brand-new state-of-the-art facility which was a half a billion dollar public-private partnership which Duke led and in this context that Ron Mullen and Sally helped the Duke and it's team to meet some of the best experts in the US on veteran rehabilitation on veteran care and on providing for veterans at the end of the service and this was a this was a great service which it did to the to this new center which is called the defense and national rehabilitation center which opened up last summer in Britain and is a terrific asset not only for Britain but also for allies and and so the acquisition she went on to work with secretary Manus in the Department of Defense yes in February Feb 9 you through the transaction yes in February 2017 Sally decided to do public service and support of safety matters when he joined the current administration when she left her firm she sold it free and clear to a group of local Washington entrepreneurs and she had to do that very quickly because the appointment of secretary mattis wasn't expected he wasn't involved in any political campaigns he was called back to come and serve his country in the nation's interest very unexpectedly and Sally and a colleague of us Tony de Martino because of their loyalty to him and the law did to the mission followed him into public service and my understanding is it's an EAJA to sell a business in a matter of a day or two to be able to be free and clear of title and to have no compliance issues while she was in government her consulting business didn't do any work for the government it was really focused on advising corporations on working with the government and on defense and national security issues I didn't buy Sonny's business one of c-5 portfolio companies a year later acquired SPD advisors from the owner supported with a view to establishing and expanding one of our cyber advising businesses into the US market and this is part of a broader bind bolt project which is called Haven ITC secure and this was just one of several acquisitions that this platform made so just for the record c5 didn't buy her company she repeat relieved herself of any kind of conflict of interest going into the public service your portfolio company acquired the company in short order because they knew the synergies because it would be were close to it so I know it's arm's length but as a venture capitalist you have no real influence other than having an investment or board seat on these companies right so they act independent in your structure absolutely make sure I get that's exactly right John but but not much more importantly only had no influence over the Jedi contract she acted as secretary mitosis chief of staff for a period of a year and have functions as described by the Government Accounting Office was really of a ministerial nature so she was much more focused on the Secretary's diary than she was focused on any contracting issues as you know government contracting is very complex it's very technical sally has as many wonderful talents and attributes but she's never claimed to be a cloud computing expert and of equal importance was when sally joined the government in february 17 jeddah wasn't even on the radar it wasn't even conceived as a possibility why did yet I cannot just for just for the record the Jedi contract my understanding is that and I'm not an expert on one government contracting but my understanding is that the RFP the request for proposals for the July contract came out in quarter three of this year for the first time earlier this year there was a publication of an intention to put out an RFP I think that happened in at the end of quarter one five yep classic yeah and then the RFP came out and called a three bits had to go in in November and I understand a decision will be made sometime next year what's your relationship well where's she now what she still was so sunny left finished the public service and and I think February March of this year and she's since gone on to do a fellowship with a think-tank she's also reestablished her own business in her own right and although we remain to be good friends I'm in no way involved in a business or a business deal I have a lot of friends in DC I'm not a really policy wonk of any kind we have a lot of friends who are it's it's common when it administrations turnover people you know or either appointed or parked a work force they leave and they go could they go to consultancy until the next yeah until the next and frustration comes along yeah and that's pretty common that's pretty cool this is what goes on yeah and I think this whole issue of potential conflicts of interest that salad only or Tony the Martino might have had has been addressed by the Government Accounting Office in its ruling which is on the public record where the GAO very clearly state that neither of these two individuals were anywhere near the team that was writing the terms for the general contract and that their functions were really as described by the GAO as ministerial so XI salient Antonia was such a long way away from this contact there's just no way that they could have influenced it in in in any respect and their relation to c5 is advisory do they and do they both are they have relations with you now what's the current relationship since since Sally and Tony went to do public service we've had no contact with them we have no reason of course to have contact with them in any way they were doing public service they were serving the country and serving the nation and since they've come out of public service we've we've not reestablished any commercial relationship so we talked earlier about the relation with AWS there's only if have a field support two incubators its accelerator does c5 have any portfolio companies that are actually bidding or working on the Jedi contract none what Santa John not zero zero so outside of c5 having relation with Amazon and no portfolios working with a Jedi contract there's no link to c5 other than a portfolio company buying Sally Donnelly who's kind of connected to general mattis up here yeah Selleck has six degrees of separation yes I think this is a constant theme in this conspiracy theory Jonas is six degrees of separation it's it's taking relationships that that that developed in a small community in Washington and trying to draw nefarious and sinister conclusions from them instead of focusing on competing on performance competing on innovation and competing on price and perhaps that's not taking place because the companies that are trying to do this do not have the capability to do so Andre I really appreciate you coming on and answering these tough questions I want to talk about what's going on with c5 now but I got to say you know I want to ask you one more time because I think this is critical you've worked for big-time company Kroll with terminus international market very crazy time time transformation wise you've worked with the CIA in Quantico the FBI nuclei in Quantico on a collaboration you were to know you've done work for the good guys you have see if I've got multiple years operating why why are you being put as a bad guy here I mean you're gonna you know being you being put out there with if you search your name on Google it says you're a spy all these evil all these things are connecting and we're kind of digging through them they kind of don't Joan I've had the privilege of a tremendous career I've had the privilege of working with with great leaders and having had great mentors if you do anything of significance if you do anything that's helping to make a difference or to make a change you should first expect scrutiny but also expect criticism when that scrutiny and criticism are fact-based that's helpful and that's good for society and for the health of society when on the other hand it is fake news or it is the construct of elaborate conspiracy theories that's not good for the health of society it's not good for the national interest is not good for for doing good business you've been very after you're doing business for the for the credibility people questioning your credibility what do you want to tell people that are watching this about your credibility that's in question again with this stuff you've done and you're continuing to do what's the one share something to the folks that might mean something to them you can sway them or you want to say something directly what would you say the measure of a person it is his or her conduct in c-five we are continuing to build our business we continue to invest in great companies we continue to put cravat private capital to work to help drive innovation including in the US market we will continue to surround ourselves with good people and we will continue to set the highest standards for the way in which we invest and build our businesses it's common I guess I would say that I'm getting out as deep as you are in the in term over the years with looking at these patterns but the pattern that I see is very simple when bad guys get found out they leave the jurisdiction they flee they go do something else and they reinvent themselves and scam someone else you've been doing this for many many years got a great back record c5 now is still doing business continuing not skipping a beat the story comes out hopefully kind of derail this or something else will think we're gonna dig into it so than angle for sure but you still have investments you're deploying globally talk about what c5 is doing today tomorrow next few months the next year you have deals going down you're still doing business you have business out there our business has not slowed down for a moment we have the support of tremendous investors we have the support of tremendous partners in our portfolio companies we have the support of a great group of operating partners and most important of all we have a highly dedicated highly focused group of investment teams of very experienced and skilled professionals who are making profitable investments and so we are continuing to build our business we have a very full deal pipeline we will be completing more investment transactions next week and we are continue to scalar assets under management next year we will have half a billion dollars of assets under management and we continue to focus on our mission which is to use private capital to help innovate and drive a change for good after again thank you we have the story in the BBC kicked all this off the 12th no one's else picked it up I think other journals have you mentioned earlier you think this there's actually people putting this out you you call out let's got John wheeler we're going to look into him do you think there's an organized campaign right now organized to go after you go after Amazon are you just collateral damage you mentioned that earlier is there a funded effort here well Bloomberg has reported on the fact that that one of the competitors for this bit of trying to bring together a group of companies behind a concerted effort specifically to block Amazon Web Services and so we hear these reports we see this press speculation if that was the case of course that would not be good for a fair and open and competitive bidding process which is I think is the Department of Defense's intention and what is in the interests of the country at a time when national security innovation will determine not only the fate of future Wars but also the fate of a sons and daughters who are war fighters and to be fair to process having something undermine it like a paid-for dossier which I have multiple sources confirming that's happened it's kind of infiltrating the journalists and so that's kind of where I'm looking at right now is that okay the BBC story just didn't feel right to me credible outlet you work for them you did investigations for them back in the day have you talked to them yes no we are we are we are in correspondence with the BBC I think in particular we want them to address the fact that they've conflated facts in this story playing this parlor game of six degrees of separation we want them to address the important principle of the independence of the in editorial integrity at the fact that they did not disclose that they expert on this program actually has significant conflicts of interests of his own and finally we want them to disclose the fact that it's not c5 and Amazon Web Services who have had a relationship with the scope of our technology park the scope of our technology park actually has a very broad set of Western partners still highly engaged there and even in recent weeks of hosted major cloud contracts and conferences there and and all of this should have been part of the story in on the record well we're certainly going to dig into it I appreciate your answer the tough questions we're gonna certainly look into this dossier if this is true this is bad and if there's people behind it acting behind it then certainly we're gonna report on that and I know these were tough questions thanks for taking the time Andre to to answer them with us Joan thanks for doing a deep dive on us okay this is the Q exclusive conversation here in Palo Alto authority narc who's the founder of c-5 capital venture capital firm in the center of a controversy around this BBC story which we're going to dig into more this has been exclusive conversation I'm John Tory thanks for watching [Music] you

>> It's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit, New York, 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Here in New York City, we're live at Amazon Web Services AWS Summit. This is their big show that they take on the road. It kind of originates at Amazon re:Invent in Las Vegas, their big kickoff show for the year, and then goes out to the different geographies and goes out and talks to the customers, and actually rolls out all the greatest of the cloud from Amazon's perspective. Of course theCUBE covering it, wall-to-wall cloud coverage, I'm John Furrier, co-host with Jeff Frick here today in New York City for special coverage. Jeff, Amazon obviously continue to dominate, but competition is heating up, Google Nexus next week, we'll be there live. Microsoft's got a big show, Azure's gaining market share, Amazon's still racing ahead. They got a book they're giving out here called Ahead in the Cloud, Best Practices for Enterprise IT. Amazon, clearly we talk about this all the time, they've cleared the runway from winning the startups, small, medium-sized growing business in the cloud native, to actually putting big dent in the market share for acquiring large enterprise customers. That has been their mission, that's Andy Jackson's mission, that's the team. Their head count is growing, Jeff Bezos is the richest man in history of the world. Pretty impressive story, we've been covering it since 2012, >> What's crazy is it's barely got started, John. I mean, just looking up some numbers before we came on, Gardener has a bunch of projected public cloud cans, anywhere from 180 billion to 260 billion. So even with Amazon at the head of the pace, I can't remember their last statement, I think it was 18 billion run rate, and everybody's saying Microsoft's brewing so fast. They barely still scratch the surface, and that I think is what's really scary. There'll be 50,000 people probably at re:Invent, there's 10,000 here in New York, they have these summits all over the country, all over the world, and so as impressive as the story is, what I think is even crazier is we've barely just begun. You were just at Public Sector, that's a whole 'nother giant tranche that's growing. >> Well you started to see the ecosystem develop nicely, and cloud native certainly is a tailwind for overall Amazon. Obviously the have the winning cloud formula, they've been ahead for many, many years. But again, competition's keeping up. But if you look behind us, you probably can't see in the cameras, it doesn't give justice, but this show, it's in New York City, it's a regional kind of like event. Its now looking the size of what re:Invent was just a few years ago. Public Sector Summit, which is the global public sector that Teresa Carlson runs, in really its third year roughly since it got big, started out a couple years ago. That's now morphing into the size of re:Invent, so pretty massive. >> And they said there's 10,000 people here. I don't know how many were at Public Sector. 138 sponsors, just some of the numbers that Werner shared in the keynote. 80 sessions, really an education session, it's a one-day event. We're excited to be here, but what's amazing is even though pretty much every enterprise has something going on in the public cloud, in terms of the vast majority of the workload, still most of 'em are not, and you know, really an interesting play. We were there when the AWS VMware announcement was made a couple of years back in San Francisco, as kind of this migration path, that's both been really good for VMware, and also really good for Amazon, 'cause now they have an answer to the, kind of the enterprise legacy question. >> I mean Jeff, did you look at the big picture? If you want to squint through the noise of cloud, what's really going on is, one, the analysts that are looking at market share, I think are looking at old data. It's hard to know who's really winning when you look about revenue, 'cause everyone can bundle in, Microsoft bundles Office revenue in. So it's actually, that's hard to understand, but if you look at the overall big picture, the landscape that's happening is that the enterprise and IT market has moved from being consumerization of IT to digital transformation. Those are the two buzzwords. But really what's happening is the operational model of cloud has created two real personas in the enterprise from a technical perspective. The developers who are building apps, and operators who are running the infrastructure, running the software, running the dashboards, running the operations. And so you start to see that interplay between operators and developers working together but yet decoupled, different personas. These are the ones that are changing how work gets done. So the future of how work and computing is going to be applied for end user benefits, user benefits, consumers, whether it's B2B or B2C companies, the cloud is the power engine of innovation, and new apps are coming on faster, and the roles are changing, and this is causing a shift of value. This is what the analysts at Wikibon, theCUBE, insights team has been looking at is that this is really the big thing. And machine learning, and AI, really take advantage of that, and you're going to start to see IoT, security, AI, start to be the critical apps to take advantage of this power of the cloud, and as enterprises transform their operations and their development frameworks, then I think you're going to see a whole new level of innovation. >> Right. They just had Epic Games on, the company that makes Fortnite which is a huge global phenomenon. If you don't know anything about it, ask somebody who's under the age of 15, they'll tell you all about it. >> 135 million gamers. >> The core value proposition of cloud is still the same, its flexibility, its global reach, its ability to scale up and scale down, and we've asked this question before and we're getting closer and closer with each passing day, is if we live in a world, John, with infinite compute, infinite bandwidth and infinite store, basically priced at zero, asymptotically approaching zero. What could you build? And if you could get that to the entire world instantly, what could you build, and we're really getting closer and closer to that and it's a very different way to think about the world than where you have to provision at 50% overhead, and you got to buy it and plug it in and turn it on. You know, that world is over. We're not going back, I don't think. >> If you look at the cloud players you've got Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and then we throw Alibaba, that's more of a China thing. Those are the main ones, you got Oracle for Oracle and IBM in there. You look at the companies, and look at the ones that have consumer experience, and look at the ones that don't. Microsoft has failed on the consumer business, although they have some consumer stuff, really not really been successful. Oracle and Microsoft, IBM have been business to business companies. Google and Amazon have been consumer companies that have bolted on a cloud just to run their operations. So to me what's interesting is, which one of those sides of the street, which one will emerge as the victorious cloud platform. I think I would bet on the consumer side. I like Google, I like Amazon better than Azure and Oracle and IBM, mainly because they have consumer experience, they understand the ultimate end user, and built clouds for that, and now are rolling that business. So the question is will that be the better model than having Azure or Oracle or IBM, who know the business model-- >> Right. >> But yet, will the devices matter? So this is going to be a big thing that we're going to watch on theCUBE is, which cloud play will win, or does it matter? Is it winner take all, winner take most? >> Yeah. >> This is the questions. >> Pretty interesting. You know you interviewed Mark Hurd many moons ago, for a long time, and he talked about cloudifying all the Oracle applications. The problem is, Clayton Christensen's book, Innovator's Dilemma, is still the best business book ever written. It's really hard to knock off your own core business, especially when it's profitable. That I think is Oracle's biggest problem. The other thing I think they have is, they're a sales culture, it's built around a sales culture. People are going out and it's a hard sell. That's not what the cloud is all about. It's really the commercialization of shadow IT. I need it, I turn it on, I activate it, I don't need it anymore, I turn it down, I turn it off, I turn it over. So I think Oracle's in a tough position to eat their own business. IBM is you know, continues to try different things and you know, with The Weather Company and Ustream, and they're doing a lot of things. But the core three have such momentum, Google we'll see, we're excited to be there next week and kind of get an update on what their story is, but still in the enterprise they barely scratch the surface of the available workload. >> I think that's the main story, the surface is just being scratched. If this is like the first or second inning of this game, or the second game of a double header, as Matt Dew has said on theCUBE many times, he'll come on today, it's interesting because if you think about the clouds that are best position to take advantage of new technologies, like AI, like blockchain, like token economics, those are the ones that have to be adaptable and flexible enough to take on new things, because if we're just scratching the surface, the new things that are going to come out have to scale, have to be data driven, have to be mobile, have to use AI, have to have the compute power. If you're kind of stuck in the old model and you have a ME2 cloud, it's going to be always hard to ratchet up and kind of always rearchitect and change, you need an architecture that will essentially be flexible and be adaptive. To me I think that's what we're going to look for here in the interviews today, and of course, security, Jeff, continues to be the number one conversation, at AWS re:Invent, and AWS Public Sector Summit. Security is getting better and better in the cloud and some say it's better than on-premises security. >> I think the resources that can be applied at a company like AWS, the security teams, the technology, the hardening, the private fiber connections, I mean so many things that they can apply because they have such scale, that you just can't do as a private enterprise. The other thing, right, is that people usually take better care of their customers than their own, and we know a lot of security breaches and data breaches are just from employees or somebody lost a laptop. They're these types of things where if you're an actual vendor for someone else and you're responsible for their security, you're going to be a little bit different, a little bit more diligent than kind of protecting once you're already inside the wall. >> And it changes the infrastructure, I mean just in the news this week, obviously Trump was in Helsinki, all I can see in my mind is, the servers, where are the servers, where are the servers? With the cloud you don't need servers. The whole paradigm is shifting. If you use cloud you can get encryption, you can get security. These are things that are going to start that I think be the table stakes for security, the idea of having a server, provisioning a server, managing servers per se, unless you're a cloud service provider, at some level, you're tier two or tier one, you don't need servers. This is the serverless trend. Again, Lambda functions, AI, application developers, all driving change. Again, two personas, operators and developers. This is what the swim lanes are starting to look at, we're starting to get the visibility. And of course we'll get all the data here in theCUBE, and share that with you this week. Today in New York City, live theCUBE, I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick. Stay with us for coverage here for AWS Summit 2018. We'll be right back.

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman! >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE here in our Boston area studio. We're gonna be talking about storage and SDI essentials. Happy to welcome back to the program Randy Arsenault and welcome to the program for the first time Rob Coventry. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> So, on theCUBE, we've been documenting it, so many shows and so many interviews, digital transformation, how everyone's going through various changes in the industry, and we're gonna do a series of interviews here from our studio talking about what IBM's doing about transformation and enablement. So why don't we start there? Randy, we'll start with you. We've discussed many of these things with you. You're back to IBM, so give us what brought you back and what's changing at Big Blue. >> Yeah, thanks Stu, it's great to be back. So it's been an interesting, so, I came back late last year, December last year, so I've had an opportunity to kind of come into this process that Rob and his team have been working on for a while, so I kinda got dropped in midstream and it gave me sort of an interesting perspective on how things have changed, first of all, so there's been a fairly significant change in the way products are brought to market, the way we message, the way we communicate, the way we enable our sellers and partners, so it's been really interesting to kind of dive right in and get right into the meat of it. And I think Rob and his team have done a really good job of building a programmatic and systematic approach to delivering enablement and education to our sellers and our partners. So there's a whole process, a formalized process, around how we create it, how we deliver it. I'll let Rob expand on that a little bit, but from my perspective, it's been interesting to be able to participate right from the beginning in kind of adding an outside end view since I'm sort of coming at it with fresh eyes. So I think it's been a really good collaboration, working with the two teams coming together. So, the process, I think Rob and his team, again, have really perfected the engine that we use to produce these things. >> Yeah. Rob, love to get your viewpoint. I mean, industry watchers, I think back to even when I did my MBA, or when I worked on the vendor side, and as I've been an analyst, IBM's one of the companies that breaks the rules as to everything changes all the time, you have companies come and go. Living here in Massachusetts, we've seen lots of brands come and go. IBM's stalwart in the industry, so give us a little insight as to what you're working on. >> So yeah, IBM is the survivor in that dinosaur game that we seem to manage to evolve constantly. The evolution is an important aspect of it, and so one of the things that we did about a year and a half ago is we evolved our sales force and storage. We went from several different discrete roles to a single storage sales role. We knew what we had to do in that regard is to bring everybody up to speed to at least a minimum level in order to sell our entire portfolio, and what its strengths bring to the table, instead of just the product they were familiar with, that they were comfortable with, and that they had success with in the past. So one of the things that we did was, we kinda observed, how did we do transformation or education in the past? And it was predominately what I call a bottoms-up approach. Have a product, it solves a set of problems, here's how to do it, here's how to sell it, here's what it does, here's how it competes, works great in the industry. When you've got a large number of products, you cannot educate people in the right amount of time following that bottoms-up because by the time that you learn it, we'll have moved on the the next set of products and our competitors will outpace us. So what did was we said, let's take a tops-down approach and ask the question, what kind of conversations do our customers wanna have that lead into the various solutions that we're trying to sell, that'll give you an opportunity to have some credibility, solve the problems on your way in, and let the conversation dictate which product it is. So we created a set of five conversation that focused on things like dev ops, modernization, resiliency, life cycle management, you know, the kind of things that every IT department does, and then go from there, and it's worked pretty well. But one of the things that we observed was, we assumed a certain base knowledge when we put that enablement together, and we realized there's a set of terms that I think that they're lacking that we need to help them with. >> Yeah, so that was kinda my first project when I came back, was getting involved in the creation of these kinda streams and assets for this education in January, and it was delivered and it was successful and it was fairly detailed and pretty explicit, but it introduced a lot of terminology that we sort of presumed people were already familiar with, and we found out that wasn't necessarily always the case. So the real goal of this session or this series, is to kinda set the stage a little bit so we almost think of this as kind of a prequel, like this is really meant to functionally proceed what we did in January, so the goal is that once this is put together, folks will be able to go through this and then go reconsume or reintroduce themselves to the January content, and have a much better sense for what the terminology is. Hopefully we can demystify some of the buzzwords and some of the industry lingo that they're hearing from clients, and really provide a better framework in which to have the conversations that Robert was talking about. >> Yeah, it's fascinating. We talk sometimes the analogies we use is, right, are you talking in the right language? For me, I think food comes to mind. It's like okay, if I go to a foreign country and even if I don't speak the language, they can point me towards, here's the meat, here's the fish, here's the vegetable, and then I kinda know what I'd like, but it's kinda nice if you know, okay, well, Portuguese food, I'm kinda going to be looking at this, so getting some of the basic down to an understand and then participate and get deeper involved. >> And the other challenge is that a lot of the terminology that we use has become very commoditized, right? The words that every vendor in our space uses and uses and overuses, things like agility and transformation and modernization and refactoring and containerization, these are all terms that our sellers and our clients and our partners see a million times every day. So not only do we need to understand that a fairly baseline foundational level, what do those actually mean, but what do they mean specifically in the context of our solution portfolios? So as we go talk to clients, we can now translate from the very abstract sort of idea of refactoring, for instance, into a specific set of best practices and solutions that our clients can capitalize upon and use to achieve that goal. >> Rob, I have to think that we've seen this transformation from the customers too. IT is not this silo that just waits for the business to come, and well now, I can't do that, or it'll take me six months. No, IT needs to be with the business, driving the business, so your sellers need to be aligned with that and helping, is we're all in this journey together. >> No doubt about it. In fact, one of our primary goals here is the give the sellers context of, I call it the explain the hard candy shell that IT needs to look like, and don't worry about how everything inside of it works. The business looks at IT as that hard candy shell. They just wanna consume simple things like flexibility and agility, so that they can turn around and deliver the business that they need to deliver in the very competitive world that they live in, and we need to explain IT in all these terms in the context from the businessperson's perspective, and from that, then I think what it'll do is help them better use that in the context of their sales efforts. >> Yeah, and a lot of this is being driven by, so IBM every year does a sea level global survey, which is a pretty big deal for the company. So this year, 2018, first one was published recently, with a population of almost 13,000 sea level clients from around the world, so this is a pretty robust piece of research, and a lot of the findings, probably not surprisingly this year, are focused on these concepts of agility, these concepts of rapid prototyping. There's three very specific best practices that are called out: interrogate your environment, so constantly be on the lookout for opportunities, changes, threats, both from a business outside-in perspective, and also from an IT perspective in support of the business goals. Commit with frequency, so constantly be evaluating where you're investing, how you're prioritizing, where you're focusing your scarce IT resources. And experiment deliberately, so do lots of pilot programs, lots of prototypes. Introduce things like dev ops and rapid development, which by the way, IBM has done, so one of the interesting things that's changed since I was here last time is internally within the spectrum portfolio, we now have a fully agile workflow, which is one of the reasons why the portfolio was so dramatically transformed over the last five years that I was elsewhere. So I find it interesting that we're litting it internally, but we're also able to communicate that to the outside world as well. >> Excellent, I'll take a large box of ready for the future. I have no idea what it will be, and I can't ask you for for it, but I'll take three. >> Alright. >> You know, you might say that if you're a big company, but we recognize that some of the sounds very big, very large enterprise, and it may not apply to somebody that's small, and one of the things that I observed in this CXO study is I think it's applicable to no matter who you are, in the value chain of some of these very large companies, because there's a recognition that you have to operate in that orchestrated world that works with the supply chain that you're part of, and if you don't continually reinvent, continually evolve your IT to enable your business to keep pace with the expectations of that orchestrated business, then you're not going to be relevant in the future either. So we think that there's applicability here whether you're a large company or you're a small company, and one of the things that we're gonna try to do here is try to help our sellers understand that. >> Absolutely, great point is no matter whether you're big or small, everybody is being affected by a lot of these-- >> That's right. >> Stressors, it's just order of magnitude for some of them. Alright, Randy and Rob, thank you so much for helping us kick off the series. >> The best, thanks Stu. >> Looking forward into digging into much more of it. >> Thank you Stu, I appreciate it. >> Alright, and I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: It's theCUBE, covering VeeamOn 2018, brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to VeeamOn 2018 everybody, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my cohost, Stu Miniman. Mike Conjoice is here, he's a Solutions Architect at Bupa Dental. Mike, over from the pond? >> Yeah absolutely. >> Over the pond rather, to America, welcome, from Bristol, England, great to have you on theCUBE, thank you. >> Thanks very much. >> Bupa Dental. Tell us about this 90,000 person organization. >> Yeah, so, Bupa's a global organization. They're primarily known for their health care insurance. Bupa Dental is a market unit that provides dental, NHS and private. So we're one of the largest private providers in the UK. We've got around 460 practices at the moment across the UK and Ireland. Bupa itself, 90,000 staff, 8,000 of that is dental. So that's clinicians and support staff. Were acquiring new practices, about three practices a week. >> Massive scale. >> Mike: Absolutely, it's huge. >> I've got to ask you, before we get into it. So health care, in England, NHS, you mentioned NHS and private. A lot of us in the United States, you know, have I think misconceptions, but what's your take on the quality of healthcare in England and the UK? A lot of people I talk to love it, they say it's really high quality. What's your take? >> It's certainly a different way of doing things, but then, it's a good model I feel. 'cause we all pay in, everyone can get that healthcare they need, they don't have to worry about being ill. You know, being ill shouldn't bankrupt you. So we do the NHS and private side of things. It's usually a lot of the same clinicians that run those models, but private we tend to cut the line a lot quicker, things like that. You're paying for the speed of the access to the clinicians, things like that. >> Okay, so but it's a hybrid model, so if you can afford it, then you can complement it, and it allows you to accelerate things. >> Mike: Absolutely. >> Okay, so there's still that level of quality that you can pay for, >> Yes, it's tiered >> But everybody's got healthcare, a hundred percent of the citizens are covered. >> Mike: Yeah. >> Mike, what's the kind of the stresses and the changes happening in healthcare, regulation like that impact from the technology sector? >> So at the moment, GDPR is obviously the big buzzword, I'm sure it's not the first time you've heard that this week. >> It's May 2018 >> We've got a countdown going. So a lot of our data is patient data, so it's critical healthcare data. So we're very lucky in Bupa to have a large information governance team that can manage a lot of the compliance and regulatory factors for us. So we need to be very aware of what we're doing with that data. We have the GDPR compliance side of things, where you've got the right to forget in an organization, but also the healthcare side of things can overrule that, that we are obliged to keep records for you know, certain amounts of time, depending on ages and things like that. >> And what kind of solutions are you architecting? >> So we, as I said, we acquire heavily, we acquire about two to three practices a week. So we are growing, so everything we look at is scale, not where we are now, but where we're going to be. You know, we've got plans to be at a thousand practices in no time at all. So a lot of the legacy frameworks that we follow, a lot of the legacy operational models we went with, they worked, but they don't scale well. So we need to put things so automation and intelligence, like Danny's been talking about in the keynote. It's things we really need to look at. We've started leveraging our data a lot more. So we pull back a lot of this data, we've got so much data, but we weren't really doing a lot with it. We've started running a lot of business intelligence, you know MIS data across that, to kind of learn how our patients use, I mean nobody likes going to the dentist, it's not a luxury treat that people go for. So trying to make that journey easier for the patients is kind of our end goal. We want to make it as painless as possible, apart from the dental bit. From making an appointment to kind of feeding back afterwards, and keeping that loop going, it's not just a one time end to end project. >> Yeah, so that whole experience. Take us inside the pieces that your patients don't see. Paint a picture of your infrastructure, I mean, what's there, what does it look like, and ultimately what applications are you supporting, you know, the top ones. >> Yeah, so dental practice management software isn't as advanced as probably as most people would think. Each practice has got a virtualization host in each. So we've got 500 service, remote branches on an MPLS link, so they're all coming back to a central data center where we keep all our offsite backups. >> Those are 500 physical servers? >> Yes, they're running Hyper-V, so they've got... They're quite low capacity, so there might be one or two VMs on each one. So although the scale is huge, the kind of the density is quite minimal. So we're bringing all that back across MPLS links that we're still not in an amazing place with network links in the UK, so some of our practices, they're not the best links, they're slow. Bringing back a lot of that data every night can be, you know, a massive issue, especially with the legacy software we were using previously. We need an offsite copy, we can't just cope with a local copy. We've had issues where practices have failed, practices have flooded, and without an offsite copy, you know, that backup drive floating in the water (mumbles) >> How does that local copy get made? That's done in an automated way from your remote location >> Yeah, so... >> It's not some gal at the desk doing the backup >> No, no, no >> like it used to be. >> Each practice has got like a USB or a NAS, depending on the size of the practice, and so we centrally manage that through the Veeam console in our data center. So each practice has a local backup job, to that storage every night, and then a backup copy job to our offsite data center to keep two copies of the data. >> And the office is closed, right, so it's not like you're dealing with high volume transactions that you're having to capture. I mean you've got a long enough window to get the stuff offsite, is that true? >> Yeah, so our bottleneck is always network, it's never source or target, it's always network. You know, some of our links we might get 200K uploads, so, if you're transferring a few gig of data it's never good. A lot of our data is digital imaging as well, which is really taking off. So you know you used to go and get an x-ray, now it's all 3D models of a scan of your mouth. So those files are... >> A lot of data. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Well we've done Cube gigs in the UK, so we know, sometimes those pipes are pretty small. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, so in the primary applications that you're supporting is this dental, this what you folks offer >> Yeah, so we've got, there's a couple of big players in the practice management software space, so we're kind of a split across those. They are moving towards private cloud software, but it's a slow process. These are the same softwares that you find in a single-person dental practice to these massive scales that we've got, so there's... They're very well known across the industry. So change is quite hard for them. >> So you're a Microsoft shop. Who's your server vendor? >> Dell. >> So you've got Dell servers, and Dell storage as well? >> Yes, so we've got Dell storage in the core. Just equal, equal logic. >> But Veeam is your primary data protection right? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> And how long have you had Veeam in there? >> Probably two and a half years now. >> Okay, great, so let's go back to three years ago. >> The good times. >> What was life like then, and why did you bring in Veeam, and what change, take us through that whole case. >> So, like I said, we're highly acquisitive. So that came with a certain cadence and expectation. So we basically got what was given to us when we bought the practice. There was a lot of legacy backup providers, you know, all the classic ones. All over the place, no standardization of what was set up, what was backing up, the reporting. There was no central pane of glass to manage that. So it was taking a lot of engineer time to check those backups. So the infrastructure team that look after that, they were having to dedicate possibly two engineers a day just to check backups, which was an absolute nightmare. It's expensive as well, you know, they're not cheap guys to hire, so you just, you're getting them to do manual admin work. So we needed a change obviously, especially with the expectations of growth. I'd worked with Veeam previously as an MSV, so I knew the product, I knew how it worked. I kind of put it forward, I think it would be the best idea for us to go with it. So we kind of went through a partner, to kick off the initiation, and straightaway they said this is a big project, you want to get Veeam directly involved. So we had a lot of help from Veeam, the SEs, the sales guys. Everyone we wanted, we had access to, just because of the size of it. And it was something Veeam hadn't really done before, the whole remote office, the whole remote office scheme, because of the licensing, it can work out expensive per socket. So they were quite interested in it as well. That was our primary driver was kind of centralizing all that management and the reporting, and just freeing up time, just was the main... >> So did you, was it sort of a wholesale, we're doing Veeam, we're going all in? Across 500 server platforms. >> It was a big blast of it at the start, so we had a lot of physical 2003 servers, so they needed to be replaced anyway, so that was perfect timing for that. >> Dave: How convenient. >> Yeah it was good timing. 2008 >> Sorry CFO, we got to do it. >> We were very lucky actually. Our finance team are very trusting of us. If we say this is the right solution, they kind of, well, if that's what it takes. >> They bite the bullet. >> Yeah, yeah. So we had probably about 200 in one go, well, in one go, over a period of a couple of months. >> Dave: In (mumbles) kind of >> It wasn't the slickest process, because we were learning at the time. The network bandwidth was a big issue. But now moving forward we're still replacing servers. Any kind of BAU replacements, we'll always go out with this Hyper-V Veeam model. Any new practice we bring on, Hyper-V Veeam. It's just, we've done a lot of power shell scripting on the background as well to... 'Cause if you think, we've got 500 hosts, that's a thousand jobs running. It's 500 local, 500 copy. It's a lot to keep track of, so... >> So Mike, the next acquisition, do you have to change the infrastructure, or can you drop Veeam in as a first before you rip out some of the gear? >> We do tend to rip and replace, just to kind of standardize it. So we keep a... We don't want to go to 350 practices and they're one model, and there's 10 at a different one. So we tend to rip and replace with our MPLS and the server, switching, just trying to keep it standard as possible for management. >> Hard work. I mean what was your result? >> Pretty good actually, yeah. >> What changed? How did you measure the success? Was it sort you saw it and... >> So, reporting before was done by an MSP that looked after us. Reporting was creative, shall we say. So were getting 98-100% successes of what they reported on. So they may have been backing up 20 files, that was working. >> They had their thumb on the scale. >> Absolutely. So we've got a lot more confidence in what we're backing up now, even if we, you know, get, which we never do, but even if 30% failures, I'd rather know about 30% actual failures than just be blissfully ignorant. It's saved a lot of the infrastructure team's time, you know, with the scripting and the reporting, we're pulling a lot into Power BI as well, so management can see those stats realtime. It's just, you know buzzword, it just works. >> That was an ad, it just works. So you save time, your staff save time. What happened, they got their weekends and nights back? You were able to not hire as many people, I presume you didn't fire anybody? >> Not that I know of, no. It's allowed them to concentrate on the work they should be doing, the project work, the forward thinking work. With that kind of block it was not allowing these guys to innovate and to see where to change. They were doing a lot of reactive work, whereas now they're fully proactive, they're kind of looking about, what's the next thing, how can we get ahead of the curve. >> Why Veeam, I know we've got to go, and you might want to jump in. But why Veeam relative to the other choices that you had? >> Well first of all it was my experience with Veeam. I've never had a bad experience dealing with them. Their support is absolutely flawless. Anyone I speak to, I always say, hopefully you never need them, but, their support guys are just out of this world. The help they'll give and what they'll, they'll go above and beyond, they'll help with things that aren't necessarily Veeam, just to get you up and running. >> Mike, the last question I had for you is, you've been expanding beyond just virtualization, you're using Hyper-V, it was big news when Veeam supported that. You're doing a lot with SAS these days, you're probably not too much in public cloud, but what do you see, what interests you, what might bring you beyond kind of the one product you're using today? >> So 365 is big for us, we're going to be pushing to 365 next year. So the Veeam backup for Office 365 is something we're definitely going to look at. We do leverage Azure very heavily for our development. So things like direct restore to Azure are good for us. We can spin up a practice straight in Azure if their physical area fails, things like that are a big boost to us. >> All right we got to go. Mike, are you going to the party tonight? >> Mike: Absolutely. >> Dave: You're fired up? >> Theme party, yeah. >> Right, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you from me. >> Actually, sorry, one last question. >> Okay. >> If you had 'em all again, what would you do over, differently? >> Probably nothing, really. >> Oh, that was easy. All right, well, thanks again for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Keep right there, we're going to be back with our next guest right after this short break.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. (crowd chattering) >> Hello everybody and welcome to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow. We are here in Las Vegas, Nevada at The Venetian. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. Co-hosting with Dave Vellante and Jeff Frick. It's great to be here with you-- >> Hey, Rebecca. >> doing the show. >> Busy week. >> Very busy week and we are only-- >> Busy month. (laughs) >> And it's only day one. So we just heard John Donahoe who is the new CEO, he's been CEO for a year, he was at eBay for a decade. He got up on stage and he said, "When I came "to this job I could barely spell IT." But I want to talk to you first, Dave, and say how's John doing, how's the company doing? What's your take on this? >> Well, the company's doing great. It's the fastest growing software company over a billion dollars. It's got consistent growth. 35-40% growth each quarter, year over year. It's growing sequentially, it's throwing off, it's free cash flow is actually growing faster than it's revenue, which is quite impressive. Company's got a 29 billion dollar market cap. Couple years ago ServiceNow, when Frank Slootman was running the company said, we're going to put the stake in the ground and we're going to be a four billion dollar company, I think this company's going to do four billion dollars in its sleep. I think the next milestone is how they get to 10 billion. And beyond that, how they get to 15 billion, how they take their market value from where it is today in the high 20's, low 30's, up to 100 billion. This company wants to be the next great enterprise software company. Basically automating manual tasks you wouldn't think there's that many manual left, but when you think about whether it's scheduling meetings, or scheduling travel or keeping track of medical leave, and all this other stuff that's manual, they want to automate that process. >> Right, exactly, that's what he talked, the tagline this year and really for the brand identity is making more work work better for people. He said that people are at the heart of this brand. Jeff, does this strike you as a new idea? Is this going to work for ServiceNow? >> It's not really a new idea but their kind of changing their shift. It's interesting when we saw Frank Slootman on he was always, the IT guys are my homies, right? He was very specifically focused on going after IT. And Fred's great kind of early intro was, remember the copier room with all the colored pieces of paper. (Rebecca laughs) Vacation requests, new laptop request, etc. How does he make that automated. And more importantly how does he let the people responsible for that be able to code and build a workflow. So I think the vision is consistent, they're obviously expanding beyond just, the IT are my homies, 'cause it's still ultimately workflow. And I think at the end of the day it's competition for how do you work. What screen or what app is on your screen as you go through your day to day workflow. And they're obviously trying to grab more of those processes so that you're doing them inside of ServiceNow versus one of the many other applications that you might be trying to do. >> Just to follow up on that, when Jeff and I first started covering this show it was 2013, less than 5% of ServiceNow's business was outside of the IT department. Today it's about 35% is outside the IT department. So they have their strategy of, they call it, land and expand. Christian Chabot from Tableau I think was the first I heard use that term. These guys are executing on that. Starting with IT and then moving into HR, moving into maybe facilities, moving into marketing, other parts of the organization, customer service management, security, I don't know if they count that as IT, but cohort businesses. So if you look at their financials their up-selling is phenomenal. Huge percentage of their business comes from existing customers. If you look at the anatomy of a typical ServiceNow customer, they might start with a 50 or 75 thousand dollar deal. That quickly jumps to a multi-hundred thousand dollar deal, then up to a multi-million dollar deal. And then up into the high eight figures. So it's really a tremendous story and the reason is, and Jeff you and I have talked about this a lot, is because when Fred Luddy started the company he developed a platform. He took that platform to the venture capital community and they said well what do you do with this? He said you can do anything with it. They said, yeah, get out. So he said all right I'm going to write an app. He worked at Peregrine so he wrote and IT service management app. And when ServiceNow went public, I remember Gartner Group came out and said, eh, it's a tiny little market, help desk is a dying market, flat, billion dollar TAM. Well this company's TAM, it's almost immeasurable. I mean it's, the TAM is literally in the half a trillion dollars in my view. I mean it's enormous. >> It's workflow, right, so again it's just that competition for the screen. And as everyone goes from their specialty and tries to expand, right? Sales force is trying to expand more into marketing. You've got Zendesk and other kinds of help desk platforms that are trying to get into more workflow. What they were smart is they went into IT 'cause IT controls the applications that are in shop. And so to use that as a basis, and IT touches whether it's an HR process where I need to get the person a new laptop. Or it's facilities where I need to open up a new building or etc., IT touches it all. So a really interesting way to try to grab that screen and application space via the IT systems. >> And that's where John Donahoe comes is. As you said Jeff, Frank Slootman, Data Domain, EMC, you know, IT guy. And now John Donahoe, not an IT guy, came from the consumer world, he's trying to take the ServiceNow brand into the C suite. So we have him on a little later, we're going to talk to him about sort of how he's doing that. But this is a company that's transforming, they're constantly transforming. Really trying to become a brand name, the next great enterprise software company. >> I think another thing that really came out in the keynote and also just on the main stage this morning is this idea of change is not just about the technology. In fact, the technology is the easy part. One of the things he kept saying, and he brought up other people and customers and partners to talk about his too, is that it really is a culture shift. And it really is about a different way of leading. It's a different way of bringing in the right kind of talent who are not just these IT guys, let's be honest. >> Right. >> But they are data scientists, they are creative people, they integrate design thinking into the way they do their jobs, with this over-arching goal of how do I make the employee experience better and how do I make the candidate experience better too. Because that's another part of this. It's not just the people who are already working for you. In the period where there is a war for talent-- >> Jeff: Right, right. >> you also have to be thinking about okay, how do the people that we want to get-- >> Jeff: Right. >> What's their experience like when we're trying to attract them. >> So question for you, Rebecca, 'cause you cover this space-- >> Rebecca: I do, yes. >> a lot, right, and you write for MIT and-- >> Rebecca: HBR. >> HBR and the new way to work and the good, I'm trying to remember-- >> Rebecca: It's called Best Practices, yeah. >> book that you did, that interview. So as it is competition for talent, how did it strike you? 'Cause at the end of the day that's really what it's all about. How do you get and retain the best people when there just aren't enough people for all the jobs that are out there. >> It's interesting because I do feel as though, obviously, you want to be able to enjoy your workday and that's what Andrew Wilson at Accenture was talking about, really it's about having fun. And it's about having it be a great experience. At the same time I do think the human part of work is so essential. As we've talked about before, you don't quit jobs you quit bosses. And it really is about who is your manager and who is the person who is leading this change. >> Jeff: Right. And how are they interacting with employees and with you personally. >> But should it be fun, I mean, they're still paying you to show up. (Rebecca laughs) >> And I think sometimes we get confused. Clearly the mundane still takes-- >> Yes. >> a ridiculously too high percentage-- >> Rebecca: True. >> of time to do the routine, where there's this automation opportunity. But the other piece is the purpose piece and they brought up purpose early on in the keynote, right? >> Rebecca: Yes. >> People want to work for purpose driven organizations and the millennial workers have said they want to be involved in that. It's not just about shareholders and stakeholders and customers. So there is a bigger calling that they need to deliver on to attract and maintain the best people. >> A couple words about the show. So we do a lot of shows. This is a legit 18,000 person show, we're at the Sands Convention Center. It's crowded, the line at the Starbucks coffee the morning-- >> Rebecca: (laughs) Around the block. >> was about 60 to 65 deep, I mean that's a lot of people waiting for coffee. The other thing I want to stress is the ecosystem. When Jeff and I first started this show the ecosystem was very thin, Jeff, as you recall, and that's one of the things we said is watch the ecosystem as an indicator of progress. Well the ecosystem's exploding. You've seen acquisitions where companies like CXC and Accenture have got into the business big time. You see E&Y, Deloitte coming in as big partners now of ServiceNow and as we've often joked, the system integrators like to eat at the trough. So there's a lot of business going on in this ecosystem. >> Right, and that was part of the keynote too. The software's the easy part. It's are you investing in the change management for your people, are you investing in best practices. And if you're not then you're probably wasting some of your money. >> Great. Well it's going to be a great show, this is just segment one, we've got a lot of great guests so I'm excited to get going with both of you. >> Jeff: All right. >> Dave: All-righty. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Allante and Jeff Frick, we will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge18 coming up just after this. (electronic music)

[Music] hi I'm Peter Bergson welcome to this Q conversation I'm being joined today by pensa who's a leader in the network virtualization world and specifically from our Palo Alto studios we've got a settler who's the CTO and founder and Steve died choose a VP and general manager at pensa now guys we're gonna talk today about this notion network virtualization tying it back to what's happening within business wise is becoming a crucial technology to invest in and how it literally becomes an essential element of a digital business but let's start with little context so if we think about what businesses are trying to do today is they go to a world that is more dependent upon digital technology and digital transformation they're literally trying to apply their data in new and different ways which requires that they connect data as an asset with people with customers with other business entities much more successful now in the past we kind of knew where the asset was we knew where the application was we knew where the person was mobile made a little bit more difficult but now we're talking about literally absolutely requiring a flexibility in how our network is set up if we're going to take advantage of the opportunities that are presented by digital business in real time as well as attend to some of the threats whether it be secure or otherwise take us through that why don't we start with you and take us through where you think this has started where it seems to be going yeah absolutely thank you Peter for having us on here so as you spend you know the the world is changing the way people interact with each other is changing the way people acquire things is changing the way people sell things are changing the way people view things are changed so essentially consumption models are just being turned on their head right so that really has a tremendous impact on the underlying infrastructure not just the network essentially how compute works for storage works and fundamentally how network works networks are very very critical right they're essentially the circulatory system of the system of the of the beast right and in order arteries and veins and you can't have a fixed system that you know essentially was put together 3040 years ago and that can be is expected to meet the demands of how things are being done today so fundamentally things have to change not only from a business point of view from the carrier's have to change because they cannot be just a dumb pipe anymore they have to get in on the action of who's producing things and who's consuming things so there's a lot of business drivers and there's a lot of technical drivers as well so Steve let's pick up where we were just talking about and describe some of the challenges of the carrier's in particular face so it used to be you negotiate for a circuit you'd pull the circuit you'd implement the circuit and it would just be there for an extended period of time but now we're talking about something that requires a lot more flexibility a lot more agility a lot more plasticity we like to talk about plastic infrastructure it's capable both scaling and accommodating new workloads and workflows much more faster how are the carrier's trying to adjust to this and how is that catalyzing demand for new types of technologies right so if you go back to what ul was saying about the changes in the external environment what you were mentioning whether you're a business or a consumer consumption models are changing the fickle nature of individuals is changing digital transformation of corporations is driving new ways of thinking from a business model perspective which leads to IT needing to be an enabler not only supporting the business but driving the business and that puts a lot of pressure on traditional suppliers of services that including the the communication service providers or the telcos or the carriers the carriers have a number of challenges and this is not new this is not new by any stretch of the imagination they're under enormous pressure based on that fickle nature based on the speed of of speed of business the speed of innovation or the need for speed of innovation cost optimization and etc and they're saying massive demand from an apps perspective for mobility perspective from data consumption perspective couple that with enhanced competition and this has been going on for a while including the over the top players the Google the Facebook's the Twitter's the snapchats anybody developing content is a competitor now and then add to that the traditional environment or the infrastructure that ooze wall references is highly rigid it's traditionally been a very rigid siloed proprietary type of infrastructure that the carrier's utilize to implement the services that they deliver to a consumer or an enterprise in today's world where it's all about agility flexibility and speed and cost optimization a rigid siloed infrastructure is not going to get you where you need to go and it also is gets prohibitively expensive because solutely you want that flexibility and your deals and your pricing and whatnots to move traffic where it needs to yeah in many respects it's it's obvious that the telecommunications companies are still reeling from the 1990s losses of data comms as a major major center of IT organizations when we all went to IP that led to some very very different approaches to doing things take us from that moment if you will of well suddenly communications went all to IP voice over IP etc how have we progressed to the point where now we're really in a in us in a situation where we can completely virtualize the network whose wall want you to give us some background on that sure you know the as I said the service providers got a bit of a knockin back in the 90s and early 2000s at a big telco bust of early 2001 I mean a lot of people got caught up in that world has moved to IP but it's still very much in you know the assets are being locked or the potential is being locked into no physical assets that cannot be moved like routers switches load balancers firewalls all sorts of stuff right that are it's critical in a proper functioning of an application at the end of the day infrastructure exists to serve an application right the demands by an application on its underlying infrastructure is constantly changing now the application architectures are evolving microservices architectures are being finalized a lot of so they essentially have completely different demands on what infrastructure needs to provide them so now that we have virtualization technologies that initially came to compute and then storage and now and I like to say that networking came a little late to the virtualization party but it is there now that there are technologies now that are available that are being developed it's still you know work in progress but you can finally transition from a fixed physical asset base to a more fluid as a base right now it's office office right you call it plasticity right actually it's an excellent term right and we call it dynamic city right and you things are moving around so the line between applications and infrastructure now is that it's blurring right what is the virtual load balancer or auto virtual gateway it's an application running on commodity Hardware right so it is you cannot think of it in you know the old terms of here's an app and here's infrastructure you really have to intimately tie them together and that's what the world needs to go well I want to pick up on what you said about we've been able to virtualize storage virtualized servers for a while and network you said it's late to the party but let's explore why network is late to the party and why network function virtualization hole an iffy thing is so essential the network is what connects all these stacks and so it's but almost by definition it's a presumption that I'm not taking the common set of storage from a single place and putting it together like and then virtualizing it it is literally I got network assets all over the place but how am I going to commonly virtualize this thing to improve the flexibility of digitally and again the plasticity of my business so what types of challenges does this decision breaker think as they have to go through as they think about what it really means to do sign envision a more virtualized Network because it's not like designing or virtualizing a set of boxes it literally is virtualizing something that's quite different absolutely you hit it on the head nail on the head there you know which lies in computing storage while extremely challenging is not quite as challenging as having to virtualize the network because network is the one that actually computer connects all of these things together so if you make one change over here it'll have a ripple effect somewhere else in the system right so the challenge is that a designer would face now is I can't do it all in one go right I can't throw out what I have that I built up and that that I quote unquote perfected over the past 30 40 years and then start from scratch again I have to pick and choose my battles where do I go where do I start virtual icing how do I connect that to my existing physical infrastructure so how do I do this in it right the manner that allows me to do this in a you know in a transition that is not very bumpy right that allows me to start virtualizing parts of the network you know the coral likely not get virtualized any time soon but it'll start at the edge right the other set of challenges now is things that have been challenges even in the physical world but there's a lot of maturity there let's call it that right performance security right resiliency those things have been beaten on for decades in the physical world and but you'd really literally have to go back to the drawing board when you as you're doing this transition from physical networks to NFV know where are my packets going how do i D bug fundamental questions like how do I trace my packet right which packet killed my virtual load balancer if my world virtual load balancer is being co-hosted on a commodity hardware that is running something else how will the chatty neighbor issue affect my load shonali neighbor issue is is chatty neighbor issue is something that I don't even control right well it's basically concerns as you said that when you start putting networks together right this device or this thing is going to affect that thing absolutely this thing starts chatting it's gonna have a potential impact on how that circuit or that device behaves in a broad network context exactly so not only who do you have to revisit challenges that you are result in over the past 30 40 years a new set of challenges have emerged as well right you know challenges that you know virtualization is not a simple thing there are there's a lot of complexity involved a lot of new technologies a lot of new protocols and all of these standards are being written right so you not only so you have to not only direct replicate and evolve your networking function and your networking services you can't lose anything in that transition but you also have to make it programmable elastic in all the goodness that virtualization is promising you so there's a whole set of challenges looking at interface so Steve that means that an organization that wants to undertake this challenge has to think differently but also has to do differently mm-hmm so historically we've had a group that did network and we had a group that would network administration server administration storage administration and now we're talking increasingly about these groups coming together and having two common practices sometimes different tools but nonetheless presume a degree of convergence that we didn't have to deal with before the storage servers guys are still having problems with that yeah what are the network guys have to do differently to truly take advantage of some of these things well you know I I think the challenge is not unlike what we're seeing philosophically of when companies try to move to the cloud and the technology piece of moving to the cloud is probably the least critical I would agree with that honestly it's a three I look at it like a triangle there's the technology there's the people and there's the processes and one of the fundamental elements of the cloud or anything we're working in to to gain greater as usual mentioned the complexity to deal with it is automation you can't you can't throw bodies at this anymore the network is way too complex the IT infrastructure is way too complex so when you look off the technology and look at the processes what's the one thing you need to do before you start looking at automating a process you've got to standardize it and your points you can't standardize a process unless you have all the groups on board thinking the same way approaching a problem the same way and trying to solve the problem the same way and a governance or interaction that aligns to this new process and very importantly presumes that that is an asset that is worth governing correct correct which it may not be but you have a tremendous amount of legacy infrastructure we never want any when this we're buying hardware is pretty obvious but now that we're doing things and software people sometimes go I don't know is that really an asset it becomes an even more important asset to the business and therefore the governance of that becomes even more it becomes and then if you take it to the third prong of the triangle people this is a different this is the exactly the same mental exercise that companies are going to as you move to a hybrid cloud on-prem off pram and the look at do I have the right skill sets to be able to do this do i retrain do I hire from outside understanding that these individuals are very hard to come by there are shortages and they're extremely expensive those same challenges probably multiplied by decades of legacy inertia within a carrier creates a set of challenges that they have to new that they have to deal with and they have to deal with it urgently because there are things on the horizon right now that a huge wall was alluding to that make what we're talking about here around network virtualization or the virtualization of network services mandatory this is not an option anymore if you looked back a decade or two of the way the telcos are the carriers were evolving their business model and their technology we've come to a point now where questions about where it's going aren't really necessary anymore it's we now need to move or we have an existential threat I want to build on that because I think one of the reasons why it becomes so absolutely essential is unlike twenty years ago where you could get it right and then plan for how it was going to change over time in today's world getting it right on day one in a way that isn't flexible is guaranteed to be wrong on day five and I think that's one of the reasons why this whole notion of virtualization becomes so important another thing I want to mention very quickly is we've done some research to wiki bond on what we call the Iron Triangle problem which is that you've got to lenders hardware vendors administrators and automation all having different ways of doing things and that's a hard thing to break especially as you start thinking about going to the cloud so talk to us just briefly about how network virtualization technologies facilitate that journey to the cloud yeah let me let me take a first stab at in the more honored as well so as we talked about the infrastructure today from a telecom carrier is basically very rigid its siloed there are siloed to us deliver a specific function or service firewall router switch intrusion protection systems pack a gateway etc etc as the need as the business model pressure or the business transformation pressure comes down in order to be more flexible agile innovate with commercial models engage in new types of business the current network infrastructure can't handle that it can't flex you have to basically it's the typical procurement model to go out and get when you want to launch if you want to launch a new service based on the old model it could take you a year that's in hire only inspects inexpensive takes you a long time and it's inherently risky who knows what's gonna happen a year from now is you're trying to launch something so we want to diminish the likelihood that we have to make a change at the hardware level correct you basically want to have the flexibility to actually fail well not at the hardware fail but you want to be able to make this valley to be wrong correct so keep so that the hardware can be stable but we're introducing a degree of flexibility above that so we can make the changes that the business needs in software correct without having to renegotiate a whole bunch of stuff correct so what you're doing with network virtualization is you're taking that siloed model which is a tightly coupled software function a router on top of proprietary hardware and we're decoupling the software from the hardware and we're transitioning that we're either rewriting it we're lifting it we're manipulating it maybe it's now cloud native and we're putting it on a virtualized environment on top of industry standard hardware which gives you agility flexibility cost savings down the road more likely from an operational perspective as well but so invoking the stuff that we know works is already in place we don't have to replace the whole thing correct now you've got a software horizontal platform as opposed to vertical silos where you can quickly instantiate services and if they fail or from a business perspective I can remove them and utilize that platform for another service and very very simply the operating model that is suggested by that software orientation is the operating model that is associated with cloud and cloud services and by doing this kind of thing in the network it provides a very very simple onboard to the cloud absolutely I mean it's essentially the same thing right I mean something has to run it so hard when it's necessary so it's very very critical right to the equation but the logic let's say in the network that the switching logic the routing logic the the security logic in the network doesn't have to reside in hardware that can be implemented in software that needs to be implemented in software now right applications have different needs what happens what will happen if a new face book comes out tomorrow right it has it'll have very different networking needs from what you have today if if the requirement is there to go replumb a physical set of infrastructure it'll fail right so you need to be able to layer on you require infrastructure yes the commonality of the hardware will mean it'll provide you certain set of capabilities but the but the logic the business logic of the infrastructure it will be implemented in software and that could be layered or not entirely so we talked about a lot of different things here we talked about digital business and how it's driving the need for greater agility will I call plasticity in the infrastructure how a software approach software driven infrastructure approach is crucial and now is available in the network but every company has to make some decisions about how its product or its set of capabilities are gonna map to the priorities it's a highly dynamic transformative environment I start leaders in this industry what races did you make when you were designing your product and what are customers getting from those choices as they think about who to work with and how this is going to impact their business yeah I mean one of the first things that we looked at was that we ourselves need it to be clonaid of our architecture what we do need it to be you know micro-services based you know how we deli what that is a different issue but the fundamental architecture has had to be closed native so that no we are in the business of helping nfe technologies to get to market and so that apps can get into service quicker right so we are those need to be aligned to that right the other you know things that we looked at is okay do we which part of the market do we want to address know where do we want to start so we want to look at segments in the network that are more mature for virtualization than others right you know as I said earlier the core will likely not get virtualized any time soon but the edge at the edge there's number of use cases at the edge that we want just one or two I mean use cases could be no the sd1 is where you scales are at an Fe and there's virtual CPE for mobility packet road which is actually a fundamental requirement for 5g architecture being rolled out in the next five years right so those in some of the engagements that we have right now are actually focused heavily on the mobility aspects of it which you'll see PE is another you know architecture you know so those are all unusual I think the the the the choices made by Penson particular both from an architectural perspective and where the use case are it was also important to identify the areas where we could make an impact we could create differentiation and solve some pretty tough problems that everybody recognizes is a problem in a very chaotic evolving market where standardization is still in its infancy so if you look at what whose wall was saying at the end of the what we're trying to do is it's quite challenging with everything that we've talked about to bring a network service a virtual network service to market design it test it validate it build it deploy it what we've focused our attention on is a lot of that good stuff right in the middle of helping people along with intelligent automation and modeling of helping software vendors service providers s eyes network equipment providers whoever is developing porting migrating a network function into the virtual world for deployment in an end of the environment we've helped them along that whole value chain of building on to make it simpler accelerate it and ensure that it's correct and Mister was time make it cheaper absolutely all right guys this has been a great conversation and talking about the evolving world of network virtualization with pensa specifically we've been here with whose wall settlor who's a CTO and founder steve dyke who's a vice president general manager once again this has been a cube conversation from our beautiful studios in palo alto california talking to pensa about network virtualization thanks for joining us thank you Peter thanks [Music] you you

>> Voiceover: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube covering Red Hat Summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome back to the three days of live coverage here at Red Hat Summit 2017. The sixth key note of the week just wrapped up. Everybody's streamin' out. We've got a couple more segments. Happy to welcome back to the program a couple gentlemen we had on actually the Open Stack Summit. John Allessio, who'd the vice president of - And Nick Hopman, who's the senior director of Emerging Technology Practices, both with Red Hat. Gentlemen, great to see you again. >> Great to see you again Stu, good afternoon. >> Yeah, so a year ago you guys launched this idea of the Open Innovation Labs. We're opening these labs this year. You've got some customers. We actually had Optum on earlier in the week. We're going to have the easiER AG guys on, I should say - I was corrected earlier this week. I shouldn't say guys, actually I think it's two doctors, a man and a woman that are on. >> Andre and Dorothy. Andre and Dorothy - so really amazing customer testimonials for working through. So John, why don't you start with, you know, give us the update on the innovation lab program. Open and innovation get, you know, discussed a lot. Give us the real meat of what happens. >> So, just maybe a quick recap. >> Yeah. >> So Stu, we had about oh a year and a half ago or so, our strategic advisory board tell us, Red Hat, we really are looking for you to help show us the way in how to develop software, but also kind of help us leverage this culture that Red Hat has and developing software the Red Hat way. And so we worked with about a dozen clients across the globe, got a lot of great feedback on what they were looking for. We created an offering and then we launched it, as you said in Austin at Open Stack Summit. And now we've done many engagements in Europe and in North America across multiple different industries. We had here at the Summit this week actually two clients talk on the main stage, both Optum and easiER AG. And both of them have been through innovation lab engagements. Very different industries, very different clients, but what it has proven in both cases is it's really been a great way and a great catalyst to kind of spark innovation, whether it's within an existing IT infrastructure or building out some capability in particular customer environments, like we did with Optum, or kind of taking some ideas. And I'll let Dorothy and Andre tell their story when they come on and work with you. I don't want to take their thunder. But a great way to show you how we can work with a start up and really help them kind of take their vision and make it reality in an application. >> Yeah, Nick, you know, we've done so many interviews about the various pieces, lots of interesting business. It reminds me of that kind of pipelining that you talk about. One of the announcements this week was Open Shift IO, which it helps with kind of the application modernization. Can you maybe help us, you know, put together how the products that Red Hat does and what you're doing in the Open Innovation Labs, how do those go together and mesh and new stuff come in? >> It's actually kind of at the core of what we do anyway. So, we are building on top of the foundation, the technologies at Red Hat's core platform. But in a residency with Open Innovation Labs we are tying in other technologies, other things outside of the Stack. But with like Open Shift IO, what we've created was what we called the push button infrastructure. How are we showing with the process and everything to innovate on top of the Red Hat technology? How do we accelerate that journey? And so we created what was called the push button infrastructure to show that foundational acceleration, and Open Shift IO is actually now kind of part of that core. And adding in other components, other technologies that Red Hat has, whether it's our ISV partners, things in Open Shift commons, all those things to accelerate the application development experience. And so I think with Open Shift IO and as Red Hat continues to evolve in the development kind of tooling landscape, you're going to see how we are helping our customers do cloud data of application development more so than ever before. >> Yep, and maybe to add to that too, Nick, we were talking to a client this morning about some of their challenges and their priorities for this current physical year, And that particular client was talking about Jenkins and a number of non-Red Hat technologies as well because at the end of the day, our customers have Red Hat products, have non-Red Hat products. I think the great thing that maybe you can mention is when you look at that push button infrastructure that we've built, it's not really a Red Hat thing, although it clearly is tied to the Red Hat technology. But it's even bigger than that. And I think that would be important for the team to understand. >> Yeah so we actually have online is what we call our text stack, and it allows the customer to kind of select the current technologies that we've currently got integrated into our push button infrastructure, and it's always evolving. So I think what we're trying to bring to the table from a technology perspective is our more prescriptive approach. But it's always changing, always evolving. So if customers are wanting to use x or y technology, we're able to integrate with that. But even more so, if you take that technology to the foundation, put a couple of droplets of the Red Hat DNA and the culture is really where that innovation and that inspiration kind of where it's - it's culminating on top of it. So they're building out the applications, like the easiER AG examples. >> John: Yeah, excellent. >> It's great, I always love - By the time we get to the end here, oh I see some of the common threads. You know, for example, Ansible's acquired a year and a half ago, boy we've seen Ansible you know weave it's way into a lot of products. >> Nick: Sure. >> Was talking to Ashush just a sort while ago. And the Open Stack commons, which reflected what you were just talking about is customers are coming, they're sharing their stories. And it's not all Red Hat pieces. One thing I think, I go to a lot of technology shows, and it's usually, "Oh, well we want to talk about solutions." But by these pieces, and Red Hat at it's core it's all open source, and therefore there's always going to be other pieces that tie in. How do you extend as to how much of this is driven by the Red Hat business versus you know the problems of the customer? I'm sure those mesh together pretty well, but maybe some learning you've had over the last year that you could share on that. >> Sure. I think one of the great starting points Stu is what we try and do in every case is start with what we call is a discovery session. So it's one of our consultants, or one of our solution architects really going into the client and having a discussion around what is the business problem we're trying to solve, or what is the business opportunity we're trying to capitalize upon. And from there, you know we have a half day to a day kind of discussion around what these priorities are, and then we come back to them with the deliverable that says okay, here's how we could solve that problem. Now there will be areas that we of course think we have Red Hat technology that absolutely is a perfect fit. We're going to put it in and make that as a recommendation. But there's going to be other technologies that we're also going to recommend as well. And I think that's what we've learned in these Innovation Lab engagements. Because often it's a discussion with IT of course, but also a discussion with line of business. And sometimes what happens in these discovery sessions is sometimes it's the line of business and IT perhaps connecting for the first time on this particular topic. And so we'll come back with that approach and it'll be an approach that's tailored to that customer environment. >> One thing kind of pivots a little bit from the topic of the technology, but I mean the culture and how we're doing this. I mean we are working with ISV's and things of how they could come through the residency to get things spun up into Open Shift commons and get their technology in the Stack or integrated with Red Hat's technical solutions. But on the other hand, you know really when they come in and they work with us, they're driving forward with looking at you know changes of their culture. They're trying to do digital transformation. They're trying to do these different types of things, but working with that cross-functional team. They're coming up with, oh wow, we were solving the problems the wrong way. And that's kind of just the point of the discovery session, figuring out what those business challenges are is really kind of what we're bubbling up with that process. >> Yeah, I'm curious. When I think to just open innovation, even outside of the technology world, sometimes we can learn a lot from people that aren't doing the same kind of things that we've been doing. I know you've got a couple of case studies here, customers sharing their stories, but how do we allow the community to learn more? When they get engaged in the innovation lab are customers sharing a little bit more? We know certain industries are more open to sharing than others, but what are they willing to share? What don't they share? How do you balance that kind of security if you will of their own IP as separate from the processes that they're doing? >> John: Sure. >> It's actually kind of interesting, we had a story this week, we have an engagement going on in our London space, which will be launching in a week and a half. But they're going on right now. And there was a customer that was kind of coming through for a regular executive briefing if you will. And we walked him through the space. And they saw the teams working in there and they were before in the sales kind of meaning, they were a little bit close-minded and close-sourced if you will. Trying to not want to share some of their core nuggets of their IP if you will. And once they saw kind of the collaborative landscape, and this is not even technology based, but just the culture of an open conversation. You know I hate to overuse - you know the sticky notes everywhere, the dev ops. I mean they were really doing a conversation with the customer that was engaging. And all of a sudden the customer that was there on the sales conversation goes, "I want to do this session, I want to go through this discovery session with you guys." And so I think customers are trying to do that. And the other thing is, in our spaces and in our locations, like Boston, we are actually having two team environments, and we've designed it to try and create collisions. So they're basically on two sides, but there's also a common area in the middle where we're trying to create those collisions to inspire that open conversation with our clients as well. Some may be comfortable with it, some might not be as comfortable with it, but we're going to challenge them. >> Nick, I love that term collisions. There's a small conference I go to in Providence. Haven't made it every year, but a few times. It's an innovation conference. And they call it the random collision of unusual suspects. It's the things we can learn from the people we don't know at all. Unfortunately, we're too much. You know, we know the people we know. We know a lot of the same information that we know. If somebody outside of the like three degrees of separation that you might find, that next really amazing thing that will help us move to the next piece, it brings me to my next point. You mentioned London and Boston, how do you decide where you're building your next centers, what's driving that kind of piece of it? And, you know, bring us up to speed as the two new locations, one of which if we had a good arm we might be able to throw a baseball and hit. >> Excellent, so let me just start by first of all saying, you know part of what we're doing here is it's this experiential residency is what it is. And that residency can happen at a client location, at a Red Hat location, or even a pop-up you know kind of third party location. And quite frankly, over the course of the last year, we've done all three of those scenarios. So all three of them are valid. As far as it relates to a Red Hat facility, what we try and do is find a location if we can that's either co-located with a large percentage of Red Hat clients, and or maybe Red Hat engineering. Because oftentimes we'll want to bring some of the engineers into these sessions. So, Mountain View, where we have a center today was a natural 'cause we have some engineering capability out on the west coast. And Boston is of course very natural as well because we have a very large engineering presence here in Boston. In fact, I'll let you talk a little bit about the Boston center 'cause that's going to be our next one that opens here in just a few weeks. So maybe Nick, talk a bit about you know what we're doing in the Boston center, which will be, if you will, our world wide hub for Red Hat innovation. It's not just going to be the Boston center, it's also going to be our world wide hub. >> No pun intended that it's in the hub that is Boston. >> You got it, you got it! >> Excellent. >> So you know, what are we doing in the innovation center, and the engineering center, and the customer briefing center all co-located in Boston. >> Yeah so it's actually going back to the collisions. We've even try and create collisions in our own organization. So it's actually an eight-shaped building. We've got four floors, or two floors on each side. So kind of effectively four floors. Engineering on one side on two floors, and an EBC on a floor above the Open Innovation Labs, and the Open Innovation Labs on the third floor if you will. And there's actually floor cut-outs, so people you know if they're coming in from an executive briefing, they can see down, see what's going on there. And then engineering on the other side. And the point there is that open culture just even within our organization, working with the engineers across the board, getting them over into our space, working with us to solving the problems. And showing, you know, I think the key point that I would hit on there is really trying to inspire customers what it's like to work in a community. So community powered innovation. All those types of things. And so the space is trying to do that. The collisions, the openness obviously, flexibility, but also what we're trying to do is create a platform or a catalyst of innovation. And whether or not it's in the location or pop-up location, we're trying to show the customer some of these principals that we're seeing that's effectively allowing Red Hat to drive the innovation, and how they can take that back into their own. So, you know the locations are great for driving a conversation from a sales perspective, and just overall showcasing it. But the reality is we've got this concept to innovate anywhere. We want to be able to take our technology, our open culture, everything you would want to use and go be able to take that back into your organization. 'Cause our immersive experience is only you know, it's kind of camp for coders or camp for the techies if you will. So you know that's working well, but that's not long term. Long term we have to show them how they can drive it forward, you know with themselves. >> Where do I sign up for the summer program? (all laugh) >> It's coming this summer. >> So Boston will launch in the end of June. >> End of June, early July. >> And the June timeframe we had, I don't know how many dozens of clients, and partners, and Red Hatters go through in hard hat tours this week, here at the Summit. And then in two weeks, we'll open in downtown or really in the heart of London. >> Stu: Alright, yeah, quick flat flight across the pond to get to London. Anything special about that location? >> I think just overall the locations all have a little bit of uniqueness to them. I they're definitely - we did design them to inspire innovation, thinking outside the box. So I think you know, if you go visit one of our locations you might a couple kind of hidden rooms if you will. Some other unique things. But overall, they are just hubs in general for the regions. Hubs of technology and innovation. And so from the go forward perspective I mean we are trying to say, you know, Red Hat is doing things different, thinking different. And these are kind of a way to show it. So trying to find that urban location that is a center point for people to be able to travel in and be able to experience that is really kind of the core. >> So London will open in two weeks, and then we're already working on blueprints for Singapore. >> Singapore, yeah. >> For our Asia hub, and had some great conversations with our leader for Latin America about some very initial plans for Latin America as well. So you know, we'll have great presence across the globe. We'll be able to bring this capability to customer sites. We've already done that. We'll be able to do pop ups. 'Cause even in some cases customers are saying you know we don't want to travel, but we want to get out of our home environment so we can really focus on this and have that immersive experience, and that intimate experience. So we'll do the pop ups as well. >> Driving change, we are seeing that that's the best way. Especially with this kind of, you know, the residency. It is a time box. So if we get them out of their day to day, some of the things, you know, sometimes are the things that are holding them out. Get them in the pop up location, get them outside of their space. All of a sudden their eyes open up. And we had a large retailer, international retailer that we did a project with on the west coast, and getting them out of their space got them coming back. The actual quotes from their executives and the key stakeholders were like they came back fired up. >> Stu: Yeah. >> And they came back motivated to try to make change without our organization. So it's disruption on every level. >> Yeah, you can't underestimate the motivation and the spirit that people come out of these engagements with. It's like a renewed sense of, "I can do this." And we saw that exactly with this retail engagement of really already working on preparing for Black Friday, and putting some great plans in place and really building that out for them. >> John Allessio, Nick Hopman; we always love digging in about the innovation. Absolutely something that excites most people of our industry. That doesn't? Maybe you're in the wrong industry. >> Exactly. >> We've got a couple more interviews. Stay tuned with us. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching the Cube. (light music)